topsoil is my prophet

"Then an old man, a keeper of an inn, said, Speak to us of Eating and Drinking.
And he said:
Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.
But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother's milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship,
And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of the forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent in man.

When you kill a beast say to him in your heart,
"By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed.
For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.
Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven."

And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart,
"Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons."

And in the autumn, when you gather the grapes of your vineyard for the winepress, say in your heart,
"I too am a vineyard, and my fruit shall be gathered for the winepress,
And like new wine I shall be kept in eternal vessels."
And in winter, when you draw the wine, let there be in your heart a song for each cup;
And let there be in the song a remembrance for the autumn days, and for the vineyard, and for the winepress."

from "the prophet"


i love to hear your voices from afar! what pleasure, what warm reminders of our shared and overlapping and distantly tied worlds.

i am settling into the simple pleasures here--a jar full of warm goat milk, feeding the bunnies corn husks before i sit down to my oatmeal, farmer's cheese with bee balm flowers, cold cold hands while i strain the sprouted wheat for the chickens, tucking the beans and tomatoes in at night, wandering into the woods to find baby trees to water and talk to. my relationships with each person spiralling and growing in richness and depth as we skip from bare facts of our lives to the architecture of our dreams and desire,
small consensual touches and warmths, testaments to our humanness,
always pandora in the background (now sponsored by starbucks...?)
and golden sunrises and sunsets,
i am learning always to ask for help (opalyn, i'm not ready to twist off the head of a chicken yet...but i skinned a chicken yesterday, undressed this beautiful hermaphroditic silent bird without seduction but with solemnity and love and a thankfulness for my own fragile skin, contained blood, moments to live in the world.)
i am reminding myself always of how my body and mind are interwoven...
fighting anxiety with sun salutes,
finding peace in stacking firewood, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of poop-straw (the most valuable of the ignoble resources), chopping, plucking, clipping,
khalil says "you work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.
for to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life's procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission toward the infinite.
...to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret.
...and what is it to work with love?
it is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
it is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
it is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
it is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
and to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.
...work is love made visible."

we are redefining work!
as i move away from jobs, embrace the in-betweens of alleys, dumpsters, travelling, excess, closed loop systems, living from my labor,
i am finding my sanity and peace here in living in the service of life, flourishing in parallel to flourishing.

i have been here for a month! (today is windward's 33rd anniversary.) halfway through my time, stronger arms and heart, my body used to tiny pleasures and tears and small pains and love and missing--these things that never run out.

dog-eared memories and waxy dreams

i have been full of dirt and cider,
memories and clean air,
rustling oak trees and adjusting to new folks.
i have been quieter than i know myself to usually be...strange. i miss playing and shouting. but it will come.
this place is beautiful
and i realized quickly that the grass is always greener somewhere else,
some waxier dream,
i am confused by having free time, no deadlines, self-managed tasks,
by having no projects i am heading up,
no zines underway,
only holes to dig, apples to cut, fences to fix, bunnies to pet;
i find myself missing theatre, graffitied walls, (structure?), good friends,
find myself struggling to feel joyful to be alive in a new way, without comfort or easy laughter or touching souls or everything shared,
aching sometimes, breathing deep sometimes,
opening myself to be affected by the people around me deeply, to cut away the shame that it is so easy to walk in with
without knowing i bore it.
remembering how to start.
remembering how to surface.
remembering to speak what i have come to assume...
i meditate everyday and feel glad to be alive and have a working body.
and as i begin to see how things developed here, i am not so ashamed of not being an expert,
not so stressed about soaking up everything--this place grows slowly, i am growing slowly here,
rhizomes tenatively crawling out, leaves not too withered and
i meet friendly soil. there are baos and games
there is curiosity and suddening into large questions,
there are parched awkward moments but there is plenty of food and roof and blankets to go around.
things do not stop in me, they start--
love does not stop, it starts--
a place can not be everything, but it is a home for now.

"different enough to make a difference?"

or, "notes from the land of goat cheese."

today i woke up in my trailer and fell promptly back to sleep.
when i reawoke, the blue lace-edged curtains and the billion bandannas were swaying and my toes were cold and the world smelled different than yesterday's world.

it's been awhile--four squids on a trip across eight states in a car smelling of bodies and tea tree oil and endless toast and warmth, camping in the rain, dreaming of burritos and kitchens, marmot humor, building a compost toilet, looking at each other in mirrors and reflections and eyeballs again and again. things becoming beautiful and every day entering someone else's little world for a little while and leaving a small trace (a wine bottle? a whiff of body? artificial toeprints?)

traveling through so many worlds, remembering the feeling of explaining myself and being alone in a new place, pulling in and reminding myself to stay open and not to hoard my memories and histories...it's been hard to write honestly for me, hard to parse out the emotional-intuitive-rush from the practical-factual-blurs. so now i find myself in a new kitchen, a new heart, and i'm a little lost without my handsaw and flogger but excited. and i feel far away but not so different.

this morning i held a day-old chick...there are a couple of them trying to break out of their eggs, and some don't make it--still eggs with a couple cracks. there are also guineas and peahens and quails i think, and a couple goats and sheep and two cats and 10 humans and a small garden with a big sign that says "rhubarb." my first job here was to make bread; then walt pulled me aside and told me the focus of my internship here will be bread-making...experimenting, researching, compiling a log for future windward breadmakers of how to make really good bread with the soft white wheat and other stuff growing locally. apparently a working person needs about a million calories a year to survive and people can eat about 4 pounds a day (which is why you couldn't survive on asparagus); 200 pounds of apples a year, he said. i think apples and bread sounds better than apples alone.

this is a funny place, a mix of old and young and influences ranging from philosophy degrees to years of polyamory to something about the military (seems like a community fetish) and something about the Six Nations and something realistic. their up-front intellectualism has kept it pretty much white. it's really research-oriented, as opposed to primarily producing for farmers' markets or being a leisure sideproject...it's an investment for the people who live here in surviving past a collapse and an opensource project in creating not only an environmentally sustainable homestead but a sustainable community structure. the care and love is scattered over a half-mile of little trailers and projects, fences and gardens, greenhouses and ramshackle somethings-that-once-were.

there's a little music; not much art around; i am the only tranny with a handsaw (though i haven't held a handsaw here yet.) but the people seem good (this kid andrew is into wildcrafting and medicinal forest-gardening/agroforesting and sarah & lindsey are thinning the forest...opalyn is working on gasification and they've got some wormies trying hard to compost...lots of building stuff and slow projects taking form) and i'm sure i'll learn a lot.

and there's so much goat milk-cheese-yogurt! more insight and maybe a picture promised with my next post; my heart is still weighing and swaying in my chest.

riding this bell curve into the treeses

today my heart and my bones are a little heavy--
it's a rainy sunday-long morning-eggs and toast and damp kinda day.
writing speed, distance, long steps and rotating wheels and flying heads,
displacement of thought, new forms of intimacy,
i'm breaking up with the world so we can figure out some other way to relate.
wait, nevermind.
i haven't been writing much so i'm a little scattered in my head; i've been thinking a lot about the past couple years, what i've become, the worlds i've brushed up against and chosen, transitioning into myself, the length and strength of relationships i'm starting to miss hard.
it's good to miss. it's good to miss. it's good to miss....
this new world is rich with food that grows on trees, grass like shag carpet and art hiding in the woods. everyone is harvester and cook and eater and sleeper alike, and we are all not so different than the marmots and the prairie dogs that dig their homes to curl up in each others' warmth.
it's funny being in a new Region, the pacific northwest, adjusting to these trees and the sea and the not-flat-ness that feels homey but also not quite like my home yet. i don't know what klickitat will be like. a new community of people that will be mine for a little while and then i'll move along, waiting for something else to snag me. pulling away from all the people and places that have snagged me in chicago, in the past, has left little holes in my sweater so i hope it doesn't get too cold here or i'll have to sew buttons back onto t.rex's flannel.
and summer...? summer? my feet are getting soft and white wearing socks all the time and as my biceps grow my arms get pale--what a tradeoff. i've been wearing the same three layers for the past three days. i've changed my skin a couple times though.

sensitivity training 101 - on casinos and their food courts

tonight i walked into a casino
looking for the "food court"
and found myself somewhere between the cracks--
it's 2 am and people are lounging in their businesswear and fuck
i'm white but dirty-scruffy, people stare but don't question, and i'm
friendly-fullofaffinity towards the people sweeping, cleaning, mopping, serving
(i asked, "do you like working here?"
and one woman said, "it's okay." and smiled strangely)
or maybe i was the strange one--
oversized dad-coat and bleachedpants, suspenders, my anarchy-democracy sneakers,
hood up,
i closed my eyes to walk through the lines and lines of moneygames,
people sitting like watching TV but playing for high stakes,
what a different kind of "limits" than the spheres
i usually like to touch.

anyway,
i bumped into people and things,
trying to avoid visual overstimulation,
and cause i was white they let me go everywhere, the manager
doublechecked the miso drypowder to see if it was veg
and apologized about the fish stock
and i apologized back to the chinese woman working there
because i felt out of place, guilty, kind of haunted.
"sorry" when my habits of forming chains of association mean that
oh wait i can't eat ANYTHING here and now i'm just picky and you're sorry
so let's cut it all short and i'm sorry.
it's not an apology, i'm just sick of you working here and me eating this shit and the world spinning a speed set by the clanking of change (into the casino owner's pocket at the end of the day, not that fisherman whose fish became dry stock became a little powdered packetbag but don't worry "it's japanese" you just haven't heard of it)

the feeling stuck with me on the bus back to white rock,
just sad,
not enough consumer,
not quite autonomous,
not american, not canadian, and yeah i'm thrilled with my nomadic mentality except it's hard to always be thrilled with being an outsider when most people are still eating up the global-capitalist-nationalist lies we're all told to swallow for our own good,
so i'm left as nothing but a sketch kid in his dad's big jacket
(perfect for liberation, i thought! but who knows about these canadian liquor depots...)

generally, before that,
my night was okay,
a fabulous rendezvous with cecile at a bar called "lolita's" on davie (gay) street,
warm family times.
but my life, built to be better and better for me and the world,
makes me so sensitive to all this BULLshit and oily inorganic faux-"mediterranean" pizza and miso soup from a dried package and fish stock and plastic spoons and styrofoam and teriyaki-who-knows-what and somethings masquerading as vegetables
and i just want to cook for myself, just want some autonomy, just wanna know
where everything comes from and feel good about everything in my body
but at 2 a.m. in vancouver stuck at the bridgeport skytrain-station-slash-casino,
life sometimes gets complicated
+ watearfalls (not cachoeiras, this is a different breed i tell you)
+ demographically oriented marketing
+ dreams of a better life but you know, i think you're not gonna find it here
and i'm pretty sure i'm heading in the right direction for me but sometimes it makes life a little hard to take.

finally back here,
after the taxi driver who rescued me offered me red-white-blue wine and asked
"you don't like girls? you don't like boys? who are you?"
with his arm creeping round my shoulder onto my thigh and oh oh oh please just get me to marine street)

missing the 24 hour plays, buddies, festivities, celebration,
queer love,
hugs,
karma,
spontanaeity,
lentils,
fabrications of autonomy,
fabric of reality,
lots of things lacking&surfeiting tonight. looking forward to coming home tomorrow.

and casinos suck for reasons! now you know!

screaming in the tunnel under the metra is a beautiful thing

it is so good to be home.
last night, z shared a thought, something like
relationships are getting comfortable in the routine of someone else's patterns.
(this idea extracted from her actual words, which are alonso's words revoiced: "and perhaps you never know anyone as much as you know the rhythms you fall into when you're around them.")
stambam said, yeah, like comfort.

i love missing things,
leaving in order to return
("the return makes the leaving less nervewracking")

but also, when i would sit by the river and make necklaces or paint gourds or think or cry, i wondered whether i was missing being comfortable (rhythms of synchrony), or people (sparks of connection), or a culture of bäo (in which i am something which elsewhere it becomes hard to sustain)...
i concluded that my feelings of saudade were all and none of these things,
and one night over caipirinhas and candlelight az and i articulated our wonder and pleasure at what the bäohaus has become for us (in part)--
(i speak for myself now, my voice inspired by others,)--
a place where we've allowed and pushed ourselves open,
to transform each other, ourselves, allowed ourselves to be(come) transformed,
and celebrated (and respected--maybe respect is not so far from celebration?) community, togetherness, and the benefits reaped from breaking down walls and norms,
and seeking seeking finding building autonomy from codependence, independence and self-reliance through safe-sane-consensual-communicative relationships,
an alternative (to) education (born in the midst of a sometimes-suffocating academia),
(and of course a refrain of
fostering playfulness,
opposing racism, sexism, capitalism, homophobia, transphobia, structures and institutions which keep people so bound up that they can't see their ropes and our teeth become too dull to chew-spit-talk a way out,
making music, art of all kinds, encouraging self-expression,
care)

these things, i think, are awesome.
and we (i, i think we) marveled at how these things have also inspired-empowered-educated us, and perhaps other bäos, to build-create-question-challenge elsewhere (or perhaps this is what brought us together--it's hard to say exactly.)

anyway,
it's good to be back here,
but it's not the place i left, exactly, not just slipping back into rhythms of comfort
(although good hugs are good and knowing how the stove works is a nice perk and having a bed that doesn't get rained on...is different)
i think there's something about returning to this space
that makes me want to rip my skin off,
spit on my best friends,
apply and translate and stay awake late and get up early,
bomb the world and rebuild it (using principles of anarchist permaculture this time)
and learning learning listening listening changing always.
to me, the bäo is not static. not closed. never the same. never dead. somehow still home.

for a long time i defined home as a place to return to,
but it's funny to find my definition shifting--
realizing that i've taken the bäo with me, and that it's spread like seeds
created like a collage, modeled on junkheaps, collectives, birdsnests, and sidewalks.

thanks for a fab potluck last night...i'm thrilled in this moment and looking forward to taking chicago (the world?) by glitterheatdirtstorm, again and again and again.

(and i would love to hear your words-thoughts-images,
in life or internet,
about what this house is, has been, could be for you,
since these walls have been built, lived in, pierced, and patched together by all of you.)

fuck europe

for eating all of my money. fucking a.

this is an unimaginative post, it's just me sharing links. then i'll get off the screen and go to the barn.

Saturday evening in Pune someone bombed the German Bakery. Now the count is 9 dead, 60 injured. I wonder if the U of C will do a program there next year.. it's a funny city. I don't know why anyone would target the Pune German Bakery over any of the other ones in the country. Maybe proximity to the Osho Ashram? (AKA the Sex Ashram, it's an expensive place to go and very popular with western tourists. and they hang out at the german bakery a lot. it's a good place to meet creeps and drink kombucha and watermelon juice (mmmm), eat green hummus and really really good coffee-chocolate cake). I guess Headley (one of the main guys involved in planning the 26/11 attacks in Bombay last year) visited the Osho last year, scoped it out. so maybe... well anyway. this happened. feels weird.

completely unrelated to that
I've been listening to the radio because the CD player in my parents car is still broken from when justin, alonso and I went to Maine last december. 1) it's all gaga 2) if it's not gaga, it's me trying to figure out what magic is contained in the refrains of these three songs
Replay by Iyaz

Whatcha Say by Jason Derulo

Let's Hear it for New York by Jay Z and Alicia Keys

there's something in these refrains that makes me feel something. it comes from outside of me and i feel good or strong, or like driving faster, or like singing loudly and bouncing up and down. also present in the Kaskade Remix of Break the Ice by Britney (~50 seconds in). this sort of feeling I think is unique to pop. it feels contrived, dirty, manufactured. it's like the assholes who made that song "Tonight's Gonna Be a Good Night" knew they were gonna make it big.

i think it's that aaj kal (these days) I'm supersensitive to media. I feel like I'm overloading, I'm hyperstimulated. my mind's been whirling a mile a minute, even now when I'm alone with my dog in the house. I can't be quiet except when I went to the Quaker meeting house on sunday. i'm so excited and confused to be back and but i haven't yet given myself any responsibilities that come with home. whirr whirr whirring with activity and a low balance on my bank account. waahfladjklfa ca

but while we're on the topic of youtube,
check out Julia's Bad Romance video (julia is mine and justin's friend. she lives in Mass and made this video for something at her school. &she won!)

oh also wayyyyy to much gaga. i'm taking a break for a while. probably until j comes back. (a week)

dead leaves and the dirty ground

so that cigarette you thought you wanted
and eventually got in a pure act of sneakitude
didn't fix that headache
and now you're not sure what's wrong with you
or if you'll ever be un-tired again

but

now we don't put much stock in the poets
in their iambs and so on
but oh
oh
oh
oooooooh
have i told you about the sky out here at night?

f u c k i t i s n ' t o r a n g e
saw every single constellation you could think of last night
pinhead clear and sparkling
the swan and both dippers
orion and the bear
all up there twinkling
like twinkling is still a thing you can do in this day and age

so much that if john donne or even that idiot wordsworth
were to sneak up behind me
and whisper something about the majesty of nature
i would hear it
and
possibly believe it

the veins of twigs and branches
the slashes of trunks across the sky
thrown up against the convex lens above us
AND THE WIND
the lone voice in the silent woods
roaring down the backroads with something to say
shouting

hey! hey! hey!

be afraid, be very afraid

there's something coming out of the trees

put that cigarette out behind a rock to hide the evidence
kick your boots off at the door
wrap yourself up tight in that blanket
and watch the creeping woods
til you can watch no more

plenum und barbaren

hello fellow squids,
i find myself on a couch in schwabing-west, afloat in my head up to my ears.

i made it to the airport on friday in high spirits. the stewardpeople on lufthansa just kept offering us glass after glass of wine and then brandy/bailey's...absurd. e, my travelbuddy and "colleague," fainted twice on the plane for mysterious, possibly malarial reasons but we landed without catastrophe. couldn't find a way to call our couchsurfing host, christian, so we just showed up at his house which worked out okay after all.

that night, we went to the ludwig-maximillian-universitat where the students are striking, occupying the main student center (which is fucking echoingly huge) to demand free university education, democratization of education. in the plenum, they were also talking a lot about "bildung" vs "ausbildung"--something like self-edification/intellectual nourishment vs job training. tons of universities across germany, austria, and some of the university of california schools are occupied.

this place had been occupied ("besetzt") for about 2 weeks and this weekend i happened to walk into the international students' plenum on education reform. classes are stopped and apparently the students have a right to protest there (or so i was told), which is why they haven't been forcibly removed. i talked to a lot of people about their participation and why there is little organizing of a student movement (at uchicago, or among lots of schools, or internationally) in the US. of course a lot of it is privatization--how much can you protest when you've paid, or someone has paid, so much money for you to be at that institution? the accountability of administration and investors to the students and faculty is also clearly quite different at private US universities as compared to here in munich.

anyway, it was a pretty amazing thing to see...so many signs, people (a huge lecture hall full...maybe 300, 400? more?), lots of crusty-looking freaks and queermos and lots of "normal-looking" and impassioned kids...and all of this discussion about the facticity of science and what the purpose of the university is, whether happiness matters...happening openly, in the main lecture hall of the school with no "adults" in sight.

so yeah, that was cool. then some band started playing and e, jeanne, christian and i danced on the desks and drank and talked to kids. we did a radio interview...i'll let you know if i can ever find it online.

today, sunday, e and i slept till about 3p.m. and christian made pfannkuchen/german pancakes and then we wandered to this huge art/market festival (tollwood...some kind of semiannual thing) and i liberated So Much. it was the perfect setting--huge crowds, tiny booths, overpriced beautiful things...mmmm. i have some new little instruments for our house. then we found our way to this place that was doing reggae/jazz-improv (lelz you were basically there with me but you would have been able to jump onstage). also the walls in this place were fucking sick...there was a huge octopus (picture forthcoming), vomiting panda bears, lots o little buddies and tags [howyousayuhhhh] out the wazoo...

all in all, it's great to be speaking german, great to talk to other people who are traveling or working or doing cool stuff, push away some of my anxiety and come face-to-face with other anxieties (hrmhrmfinals, these things "queer" and "radical," what is awkwardness, the place of art in my life). i am missing the baohaus like woah and my attachments to people in general. i have so much of you inside of me.

love,
eliot

more info on the LMU occupation if you're interested
someone at the plenum talked about this site for int'l student movement