Happy Feast of the Great Earth Goddess Ishtar to you! May your garden and your mind be fertile as, well, …
I used to tell my lop eared bunnies, Nijinsky and Moonlight, that once a year, people worship rabbits. This never impressed them.
They had jobs. They were the recycling service in my wedding florist shop during the ‘nineties on Maui. Totally spoiled, they feasted on slightly imperfect lilies, orchids, rose petals, babies breath, gladiolus and all manner of green leaves, but distained iris, anthurium and protea.
Like cats, rabbits prefer to hide their excrement, and will use a litter box without prompting. Like the fisherman’s cat, the florist’s rabbit eats the most succulent leftovers from the work table, but, unlike cat poop, bunny poop is the fertilizer of choice for growing darn near everything. So they fertilized the exotic tropical greens in my garden that fattened my bouquets and arrangements, and they also fed the papaya, mango and banana trees. I used to refer to those excellent papayas as…um, bunny doo melons. (Sorry.)
They also entertained me while I worked, playing with my bare feet. Even though I weighed twenty times either of them, my feet were only twice as long as their hind feet, and shaped exactly the same way, which led them to suspect I was part rabbit. Truly, I felt honored to be trusted by someone so low on the food chain.
I am always interested in the Farm because I attended Stephen Gaskin’s Monday Night Class metaphysical lectures in San Francisco, and later followed the story of the tribe that formed in those classes, became a cross-country caravan for the book tour of the book created from Stephen’s talks, and then created a rural commune. The commune they envisioned and created in Summertown Tennessee became arguably the largest and most influential commune of them all, launching numerous large-scale charitable projects, publishing books, founding and running a natural birthing clinic, and manufacturing and selling vegan, organically grown, food products. Eventually they created the concept of the ecovillage, inspiring the founding of ecovillages all over the world, which are connected through the Global Ecovillage Network. My friend, author/scientist/attorney Albert Bates, who joined The Farm in its early years, established and directed the Ecovillage Training Center, which is still teaching new generations to live off-grid while saving the planet.
The cultural cliché has it that the flower children danced at Woodstock, crashed at Altamont, and gradually shed their naïve ideals as they made themselves into ice-cream moguls, media magnates, and triangulating politicians. But the 200 people who live at the Farm—a 1,750-acre spread in the heart of Tennessee—have managed to hang on to the hippie spirit. It isn’t like they sit around talking about peace and love all the time, and hugging one another, and meditating, and eating tofu, and drinking soy coffee, and smoking weed, and criticizing the government, and making hopelessly earnest remarks—well, actually, it is like that, come to think of it. Farm residents do all that stuff, as I learned only too well during my four-day visit, this past January. But the Farm isn’t where you go to dream your life away in a 1960s-besotted haze. The place is active, fully engaged with the world. And it has a strong backbone in the form of 10 nonprofit companies and 20 private businesses.
Unlike the rest of us slobs, who sleepwalk through the workweek only to collapse at Friday’s finish line, the people at the Farm haven’t given up on the half-forgotten, laughable-seeming notion of making the world a better place. They have energy and enthusiasm. They take long hikes, they chop wood, and they actually bother to take part in marches against the war. They build their own photovoltaic solar panels, they grow tomatoes in backyard gardens, and they try not to be grouchy with one another. After dinner, when it’s time to wash the pots and pans, they don’t make a huge deal out of it by running the water full blast while listening to loud music, the way I do at home. For Farmies (as they sometimes call themselves), doing the dishes can be a meditative act involving a few inches of hot water at the bottom of the sink basin and some light splashing with a squirt or two of a non-petroleum-derived soap. They’re making a constant and conscious effort, in other words, to live without harming other people, animals, or the planet. So it’s not just some goofy lifestyle thing.
Next Year in the Oasis of Peace
by Iris Keltz 4/1/07
The cornerstone of Jewish tradition is the dialectic, the art of arriving at the truth through conversation involving question and answer. The rocky road to peace and reconciliation is paved through dialogue. At the Passover seder this year we will ask the four questions, (or maybe more.) In accordance with tradition we will retell the story of Exodus, from slavery to freedom. The precious gift of freedom has to be guarded by each generation but not at the expense of another people’s suffering.
During the seder, we say, “Next year in Jerusalem” a statement that raises many questions. For some, orthodox Jews, Jerusalem is a spiritual state not to be confused with a nation state. But Jerusalem on earth began over four thousand years ago as a Canaanite city and has known a succession of occupiers and conquerors—Romans, Byzantine, Persians, Umayyads, Abbbasids, Crusaders, Mameluks, Ottoman Turks, the British, the Jordanians and currently the Israelis. This year when we say, “next year in Jerusalem” can we imagine the possibility of sharing this war ravaged city, sacred to Jews, Moslems and Christians the world over?
Currently, hostile environment exists when progressive Jews and Jewish organizations dare to speak out. Let it be known, that Jews do not march in lock step and that AIPAC does not speak for all of us. To marginalize our voices diminishes all of us. When Dr. Norman Finkelstein expresses a profound disturbance that holocaust memory is invoked to silence criticism of Israeli government policies, know that he is committed to the survival of that country and he is a child of holocaust survivors. Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian, focuses on the effects of a forty year occupation and the hideous separation wall that afflict the Palestinians. Both men believe that adherence to UN resolutions and International Law is the only way to resolve the sixty year old conflict that threatens to spread to the entire world. Instead of attacking these voices as anti-semitic or self hating, consider the wisdom they bring to the table.
Jewish Law explicitly guides us to ethical behavior. “What is hateful to you, do not do to others.” In 1998, I traveled on ‘Jewish Only Roads’ in a rental car with yellow license plates that identified me as a Jew which allowed me to zoom past checkpoints almost missing the turn off for Jericho, which was not honored with a road sign. Leaving the superhighway, I found myself driving on an old pothole-riddled road fit for donkeys. Palestinian towns do not get equal government funding for schools, roads and infrastructure, even when they pay taxes.
In the halls of Congress, I heard testimony from Israeli soldiers. One told a story of entering a quiet Palestinian village in the middle of the night with his platoon to arrest a young man. When an old woman stepped forward to protect her grandson, the soldier suddenly envisioned the face of his grandmother and knew that she would have stood up for him in the same way. The difference between ‘them and us’ dissolved and he left the army to become a Refusnik.
Some would have us believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is too complex for the human mind to comprehend. Throw religion, politics, government, nationalism into the same pot of stew and the result is indigestible. Remove the ism’s, the ideologies and the fear and we are left with this thought: Thousands of Palestinians are suffering human rights abuses as a result of a forty year occupation. The world needs open honest discussion within and without the Jewish community. The final solution will either create a true sanctuary for Jews and Palestinians—there’s land and resources for everyone to share—or it will condemn generations to ongoing racism, violence and war.
On my last trip to Israel/Palestine, I stayed at the Oasis of Peace, Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salaam. This utopian village was abnormally normal—Arabs and Jews lived as neighbors, sent their children to the same schools, sat in each other’s yards and shared the abundance. They prayed in silence in the white domed structure near the village cemetery. A rabbi once said, “The world rests on three things: On Justice, Truth and Peace.” Said another rabbi, “But these three things are one and the same: For if there is Justice, there is truth, and if there is Truth, there is Peace.” Next year may we all be living in an Oasis of Peace, where ever that may be.
Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal by Naomi Shihab Nye
After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, Please come to the gate immediately.
Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she Did this.
I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, Sho bit se-wee?
The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used – She stopped crying.
She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,
Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and Would ride next to her—southwest.
She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.
Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and Found out of course they had ten shared friends.
Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering Questions.
She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—And was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same Powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookies.
And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.
And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,
With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Not a single person in this gate – once the crying of confusion stopped – has seemed apprehensive about any other person.
They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere.
“For all those of us born Jewish into a post-Holocaust world, the issue of Israel and Palestine is a deeply painful one…. Palestinian nonviolence is, perhaps, more deeply threatening than suicide bombers, for it challenges our myths and our picture of ourselves as the always innocent victims, righteous and good, justified in anything we do as long as we call it ‘self-defense’. To give up that myth and face the ugly reality of injustice, to admit that we who were so oppressed can become oppressors, is excruciating.” Starhawk
Dr. Bill Roley founder/director of the Permaculture Institute of Southern California and professor of environmental design at University of California at Irvine, welcomed Albert Bates, David Cann and me to his permaculture garden and environmentally designed homebuilt house on a hill above Laguna Beach.
The amaranth, carrots, onions, kale, swiss chard and other lucky denizens of Bill Roley’s sheet-mulched garden terraces on a hillside overlooking the ocean bear abundantly.
On the steep incline across the road from his home, Bill built up terraces of compost that are steadied by the roots of the many fruit trees he planted in them. Here Albert Bates inspects the terraces.
Bill’s garden is a place for poetry, music and art as well as for thriving plants that feed people, mineralize and fertilize the soil, feed insects and birds, and provide beauty and shade.
Three robust, chemical-free carrots and a leek on a bamboo cutting board, freshly washed in Bill’s kitchen after being harvested from his garden.
Bill Roley took us for a walk on the summit of the hill onwhich he lives, where we saw a distant squall in the Laguna Hills – unusual weather in those parts.
He also took us sightseeing around Laguna Beach, which deservedly refers to itself as the southern California Riviera. The landscape, weather, and artist milieu certainly resonate with the Mediterranean coast. Here we look south upon Crescent Beach, one of many white sand beach coves, and the hills beyond.
That evening we attended a gathering organized by Bill so his community could hear Albert speak, at the charming, environmentally designed home and garden of green builder/designer Christopher Prelitz and his artist wife Becky.
Rave reviews of the house appeared in Riviera Magazine in December 2006 and Natural Home Magazine in July 2005. It was easy to see why while touring the house with Chris. Elegant natural details, like the nautilus shell at the turn in the staircase abound, yet the house is gorgeously uncluttered. Chris says he built his palace on a shoestring, using many recycled materials, and spending lavishly “only on windows and doors.”
The terraced permaculture garden uses the oddly shaped lot to advantage.
As promised, I returned to Los Angeles Eco-Village by daylight, but much sooner than I had imagined. The day after his talk there, Albert Bates invited me to accompany him and David Cann, a local community eco-organizer, to visit Dr. Bill Roley, founder/director of the Permaculture Institute of Southern California and professor of environmental science at UC Irvine, at his home and permaculture garden in Laguna Beach. So, we met at the LA Ecovillage before taking off on our journey.
So, here’s how the entrance looks by daylight.
Lois Arkin, co-founder of the LA Eco-Village and a stalwart of the ecovillage movement for decades, welcomed me and David while watering the front garden (fruit trees, herbs and a blossoming cymbidium orchid) and sprucing up the front porch with a handmade broom.
Playful community art adorns the exterior of the building. A mosaic bicycle and wheelchair ramp signed by a local middle school leads from the street to the front walk.
Windchimes, banners, and whirligigs dispell any notion of staidness here.
A cob (mud clay) bench in the shape of a dragon on the street in front. Many intentional communities create public sculpture in this medium.
Drawn in chalk the street in front, a wheel of fortune…
…and an angel. Those, and the dragon, Smaug, sum up the enigma of Los Angeles…
The living room/lobby of the ecovillage dormitory, furnished with recycled furniture in the era of the building, serves as a comfortable meeting room.
The very busy bulletin board and flyer table in the living room/lobby.
Bicycle parking in the inner courtyard. Community members proudly disdain automobile ownership, and make use of the city buslines that pass near their home. One member works at a cooperative not-for-profit, the Bicycle Kitchen, which helps people build their own bikes from recycled parts and repair their bikes themselves.
The community garden thrives in a miniature climate created by the buildings on all sides.
March 25, 2007. Albert Bates, ecovillage educator, author, inventor, and environmental savant extraordinaire, presented the case for pausing to breathe and seriously consider the situation rising inexorably before us. Do we go on with business as usual? Do we look for technologies that will solve the disasters inherant in the decline of petroleum production and the rise of global temperatures? Do we scale down our consumption of fossil fuels, meat, trees and nuclear materials, and start planting trees, bamboo, roof gardens, artificial wetlands, and community agriculture projects? Or do we just cower before the oncoming catastrophes and weep?
Albert illustrated his point with a bottle allegory. Suppose if you put two bacteria in a bottle and they double every minute, and the bottle would be full in 24 hours. When would the bottle be half full? At 23 hours and 59 minutes. When would it be one quarter full? One minute earlier. When would it be one eighth full? Three minutes to doomsday. If the bacteria were smarter than humans, would they stop doubling at the point that the bottle is still seven eighths empty? If they could get another bottle when the first one was full, how much longer would they have to live before they began dying off from lack of space? One minute.
I had never been to the Los Angeles Ecovillage, a group living situation focussed on minimizing its eco footprint and inspiring others to do likewise, located in a densely settled urban area just west of downtown Los Angeles. The folks are very friendly, and I intend to come back and take a tour. I promise I’ll bring my camera and post here! With fifty earnest and educated people gathered in the village living room(some of them ecovillage residents and some students from the recent urban permaculture course), Albert faced a rapt audience. Do we understand how little time we have to DO SOMETHING about this?
The charming old building where the ecovillagers now live once housed the workers who served at the Bimini Hot Springs Resort that existed in the 1920’s on the street of the same name. Somewhere, under this neighborhood, hot springs still bubble!
Albert Bates and I met online some years ago as board members of the online Hippie Museum. I wrote a review of his book The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook for this weblog, and I recently sent his book to my publisher in Japan, Soshisha, Ltd., hoping that they will be as dazzled by it as I am. The book is a necessity for everyone, besides being a fun read, and that’s saying something.
He told us, “The reason I’m not home at the Farm is that I am being Paul Revere.”
Yesterday I viewed an inspiring example of community-produced art from Africa, currently on tour in the USA, the Keiskamma Altarpiece. Sewn and beaded by more than one hundred thirty women and several men in the tiny South African seaside village of Hamburg, it commemorates the AIDS epidemic that almost destroyed the village and the brave ones who took upon themselves to do something about it. The creation of this work, with its intense community organizing, inspired everyone in Hamburg who had previously avoided HIV tests to get them and get treatment if needed. This detail, from the left half of the base of the piece, shows the suffering, death and funeral of an AIDS patient, Dumile Paliso, whose mother, Susan, is depicted on a panel below.
Inspired by the Isenheim Altarpiece, created by Matthias Grunewald during the early 1500’s to celebrate the deliverance of the Alsace Lorraine region from the ergot fungus plague known then as St. Anthony’s fire, the Keiskamma Altarpiece was born from an idea by Dr. Carol Hofmeyr, who, with her physician husband, founded and ran Hamburg’s first and only AIDS hospice and treatment center. Carol Hofmeyr also holds a degree in fine arts, and this was her way of combining her areas of expertise to serve the community. Her husband built the enormous frame that holds the three layer fiber artwork. This detail, the right half of the base, shows the burial of the dead.
Here is the whole base as one piece.
Like the Isenheim Altarpiece, the Keiskamma (named after the river that flows through Hamburg) when it is closed shows a cross at the center, but instead of Christ, there stands a Xhosa woman dressed in mourning for her husband, and instead of Mary Magdalene and St. John, she is surrounded by the many orphaned children of AIDS victims and the grandparents and other older members of the community who are called upon to look after them.
On either side of the central cross, instead of saints, local women who have lent their support to the surviving family members are depicted. Above, Susan Paliso, dressed in the formal style of Methodist church-going women in Hamburg…
…and on the other side, Leginah Mapuma, dressed in the formal dress of Anglican church members.
Inside the first set of doors of the altar, the dancing prophet Gaba seeks inspiration from God upon the sand dunes.
On the door to the right of Gaba is the wild fig tree, shelter and food to the people of Hamburg village.
On the door to the left of Gaba is the great spiral of life, on land and on sea.
A detail of the fish in the panel above, showing the beadwork.
On the innermost panels, the Keiskamma river flows beside the land outside of Hamburg where the dead are buried. The trees are translucent, like ghosts, suggesting that entire family trees have disappeared.
And yet, at the same time, the river and trees suggest survival of adversity, and the continuity of life into eternity.
Onstage May 4, 2007, singing for a thousand people at the Rainbow Festival at Aso Mountain, Kyushu, Japan. Photo by Tatsuya Nema. It’s a rainy night, and I’m wearing Japanese rice planting rubber boots under the patchwork dress made for me in 1971 by Charlotte Lyons, an artist friend who lived at Wheeler Ranch during the time I created Living on the Earth.
April 30 “Living on the Earth Festival” at the Loveland shop and spiritual center in Kumamoto town on the island of Kyushu, with Sachiho Kojima.
May 4 at the “Rainbow Festival” at Aso Mountain on the island of Kyushu. I’ll be performing a 45-minute set of my songs with a band. The festival is using the Living on the Earth cover goddess as the poster graphic.
May 6 through 10th: Three shows on the island of Kyushu with Sachiho Kojima’s all woman trance trio, Amana, and then two with Sachiho only. On May 6th at the Tomigawa River Festival in the Issahaya district of Nagasaki. On May 7th at the art studio of world reknown granite sculptor Hiroto Sakamoto in the Sazachou district of Nagasaki. On May 8th in the Yobiko area of Saga City. On May 9th at Organ’s Melody night club in Yamaguchi. On May 10 at Chakra store and tea house in Osaka.
May 19 and 20 “Natural High” Festival at Doshi on Honshu island (about two hours from Tokyo). 45 minute set of my songs (as above) but with a different band! Plus I lead a redux of the decoupage visualization shrine-building from recycled objects workshop I did at the same location last October for Artist Power Bank. And it all gets filmed for the Eco-Words television show, which airs nightly on BS Asahi TV, a station watched by half of the households in Japan.
May 29 and 30, workshop and concert on the island of Oshima, organized by my friend Mana.
June 3, 6 to 8 PM, at Hobbit Theatre, Tokyo, Concert. Two sets of me and the legendary punk/ska/indie rock singer Yoko Utsumi in a musical dialogue.
June 9 workshop and concert with Sachiho Kojima of Amana in Toyko sponsored by Anima.
June 11 and 12, two workshops and concerts with Sachiho Kojima in Tohoku, which is the moutainous and forested northern-most province of Honshu island, one in the town of Sendai and one in the town of Morioka.
June 17 and 15 “Living on the Earth Festival” at Yukotopia Deadheadsland Nightclub in North Tokyo. This time, TWO 45 minute sets (9 to 11 PM), with Jun and Ken, an excellent bass player and lead guitarist I met last October when I played there last.
Yippee, the new edition of the Feeling Good Cards is out, with my illustration on the back of the cards and my graphic design on the box. Here’s the webpage: http://www.feelinggoodcards.com/home.html
Gloria Blum first created the cards back in the 1970’s while working with developmentally disabled teenagers. She found that they opened up to her if she asked them questions they enjoyed answering. She collected the questions and had them printed up as a set of flash cards, and soon had created a cottage industry, first within her own profession, and soon to other related counseling and helping professions. She then discovered that the questions make a fun party game for people of all ages, and determined to sell the cards to the general public.
When she ran low on her original printing, she asked me to re-design the box and make an illustration for the backs of the cards, drawing in a cartoon style a wide variety of people, all having a good time. In the drawing, I included her and her collaborator and husband, Dr. Barry Blum MD. He’s the one playing a bass balalaika and she’s singing with her arms upraised, as they often do in their Hawaiian klezmer band, Kona’s Traveling Jewish Wedding, which released a bewitching CD album a few years ago called Shaloha Oy (the title track being a minor-key up-tempo version of Queen Liliou’okalani’s famous Aloha ‘Oe).
Here’s a sample question card! I’d love to answer that one.
Here’s Gloria singing with the klezmer band. With her divinely passionate Yiddish spirit, she’s the Janis Joplin of klezmer.
Here’s the whole band, at a performance a few years ago. Gloria is singing a duet with Ros Cohen.
Alicia Bay Laurel 
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