PH ***ing the Man

I do not abide being called names, so there are few that I put on others. A comment or two have come about because I do not like to give up when faced with a ruling class of exploiters and oppressors, willing to extract all that is good from whatever "resource" they feel like exploiting that day. We must each attempt to delineate in our own way, how much we will be constrained by "the man". When I was a child, my Grandpa, who was a baker for a large corporate concern, was a staunch union man and worked hard to assure that workers there could make a respectable wage in relatively good/safe conditions. I found out that the workers had absolutely no say in the process that was used to make the bread. (bean counters did all of that.) I knew that we would never buy or eat that 'poor person's bread', as my family called it. According to Grandma, "The ingredients list alone proved that you shouldn't be eating it." Grandpa felt that getting as much as possible from those bastards was as good as you could "get". He probably didn't hear about the man until he was so indebted to corporate welfare whores to even know how or why.

This is what zero emission vehicles look like. When grid tied, they sport tiny emission footprints from faraway generating stations. Their massive efficiency coefficient reduces even faraway emissions massively relative to traditional fossil fuel powered vehicles.

This is the amount of solar panels required to fuel just one of the vehicles pictured above. Note that the hot water panels, not used for the car, are the four that are propped up and facing true South. Photovoltaic cells only need light.

Even as a child, I could see that there was a sense of resignation that the highest status he could achieve, would be to allow his labors to be capitalized upon by others, people so wealthy, to not have ever known want. Later in life, I began to understand that he was on the same rung of the economic ladder as the people George Bailey, from It's a Wonderful Life, was fighting for. Grandpa had fought hard and managed to get to the top side of his rung, perhaps, but certainly not one higher. I asked about his product one day, "Why are they allowed to call it Holsum, if it is actually bad for you?" His response has come back to me repeatedly over the years. He said, "Kid, watch you mouth, someday you're gonna' be trouble." He had drawn a line across his experience and underlined it, the worker's job was, is and will forever be, servitude. I'm sure that somewhere in his formative years he heard that the grass that stands the tallest gets cut down most, or something to that effect. blending in always made the best sense. In his time, it was admirable that he helped fight for reasonable subsistence wages. He waged another fight against the man in the marketplace.

Only in a lifetime have I come to know my own limits...where I am ready to accept complicity. I rationalize that by putting myself in servitude intermittently, thoughtfully and by choice, makes me less of a wage slave, less of a corporate tool, but to this day, if I look critically at the situation, I'm just a skilled caterer of sorts, serving up hollow distractions. The man is well served by providing bread and circuses. I am part of the machine that makes entertainment. To put book ends on what I learned from my grandpa, the last time I saw him alive, he said, "Always pay your dues to the stagehand union, I got paid better there than any other job. I do participate in the economy (have a vocation) to support my non-profit activities (avocation). It is a powerfully humbling experience to be the Director of an organization that has planted millions of tree seeds and many tens of thousands of actual tree seedlings. The few times that I get to be a stagehand with a powerful and culturally important show are few, yet more than 100 nights each year I am pumping out my own labor for others to achieve their dreams.

The reason I used the PH to start the dirty word, in the title is because it takes a certain amount of savvy, to begin to deconstruct "the man" of lore. I been down wit' all 'dat for decades...I'm not shittin' anyone when I say that we are all victims of a world-wide crime. Not just against humanity, but each and every critter on the face of Gaia, (Mother Earth, Starship Earth, or whatever you want to call this planet.) every resource is being squandered for the survival of corporate welfare whores who are considered too big to fail. Pay no attention that over 90 % of all bacteria, fungi and viruses found in healthy soil have been exterminated through the use of petro-chemically derived, toxic compounds. Ignore for a moment that water, worldwide has become undrinkable, vast aquifers and massive oil and gas fields have been depleted yet we sink wells deeper every day.And leave blank the image in your mind of the largest ocean on the planet,  radio-logically (illogically, if you ask me) contaminated.

There is a way to turn back the carbon clock. Sequestration. I live near the 45th paralell. Around here, wood is considered a renewable resource. There is an abundant supply and transport costs are relatively low. Through gassification, about half of the fuel value of the wood is driven off as carbon-less energy. This process, called gassification, yields what has been come to be known as "syn-gas". (synthetic, carbon neutral natural gas.) Burning the wood without air also yields char, a powerful source of pure carbon in the micro-structural shape of literally billions of tubules, perfect for biological activity. In our own gardens, we have increased yields using char by over 60%. Side by side tests that we have been doing for the last few years are so amazing that I see no reason to deprive any soil this kickstarter for life! In addition to helping to rebuild living soil, the char helps with water holding capacity as well. Carbon sequestration and biological rehabilitation combined? Yes! The most mind boggling fact about char is that in one handful, there are over fourteen acres of surface area. Most of us will never own that much territory, but we can enrich many times that much land by adding char to our magic bags of tricks. We need every oar in the water, get busy transforming the planet people.

Pass this information far and wide. If you would like more information on char, please request an ECO-Tour on just that subject. We would be happy to introduce you to a better understanding of how to make, inoculate and integrate this priceless black gold into your gardens, lawn or fields. This is all part of the change that is going to have to happen, nearly overnight, if we are to leave a liveable planet for future generations. The writing is on the wall. Understanding the man is easier today than at any time in human history. Whom do you serve takes on meaning when you see that the military industrial complex has subsumed healthcare, insurance and banking to such a large extent that we are often serving multiple heads of the same great beast. Feeding the beast, even the tiniest morsel requires some soul sacrifice. Had I understood this fully, I'm sure that I would have never signed my first mortgage papers. My ecology is deep, some call it deep green, but it is vibrant as all colors under the Sun. The deep and abiding love that I have for the planet is reflected in all of my activities. The man has placed himself at odds with the health of the planet and it is my right to depose him from power. My choices make the fight possible and envisioning a victory makes hope possible.

It may sound strange, but at least in my country today, we all seem to be delusional enough to think that we can fight the man into parity, while still shackled to the great behemoth. In fact, the great and powerful beast that has sterilized the soils, tainted the air and turned rivers to sewers seeks to put a good face on it. We have seen in recent history several billion dollar ad campaigns telling us that BP is "Beyond Petroleum" and how they have made the Gulf of Mexico better than it had been before their disaster. Having had one bite too many of contaminated Gulf shrimp, I'm thinking not. We keep seeing amazing things about how technology can be brought to bear in reducing storm damage from super hurricanes. It is not said aloud, but the implication is that there is little we can do to stop hurling past any reasonable limits. Technology and science are not the same thing, they bounce back and forth as if they are two spastic inmates shackled by long tethers. They always have and will always dance this chaotic way. We learn, often too late that what we were able to do should not have been done, what seemed reasonable at the time was for the worst. Often the greatest new technologies are proven later by science to be the worst possible thing we could have pursued. Thinking that new technology could hope to save us from the current dominion of the oligarchy, or the effects of climate change is naive.

I am far too sick to my stomach over Fukushima to say "We told you so", but we did. It could have mattered twenty, nay, thirty years ago. Today, we are looking at our own, and very real, radioactive nightmare, as if it is still in black and white, or worse, just a news story about somewhere far away. Nothing on this planet is very far away when you are radioactive fallout, are we completely fooled? Trying to fight the man, without understanding that the current system can no longer support itself seems daunting. The corporate welfare state needs our blood, our treasure, our complicity, otherwise it is on the wrong end of the gangplank and we are in full mutiny. It is hard to prod the beast off that gangplank if we nail our tongue to the gunnels. Worse still, would be to shackle ourselves to the dying corpse of "the man" as he goes to the depths. We hear snippets about divestment, but some are all in with the man.

Don't think for a second that the billionaires playing the markets will ever share a penny of their wealth with you.That just isn't happening. Let me go back to that bit about Grandpa and the marketplace. He always was a chiseler. He worked hard for every dollar and was hard put to spend even a dime recklessly. He knew that once spent, dollars tended to flow away from his town and into the hands of ever bigger guys. Yesterday, I did Grandpa proud. I went to a local lumber yard, paid a little extra, but saved more than a gallon of gas, plus having to drive to two different places for the best price. We must slash at the belly of the great beast that has us in its maw. Only when the entrails flow free will we see the value of what the man has taken as his share all of these years. Abundance is available, but it begins from the grass roots, or the interactions of the soil organisms that make them possible, all the way, up.

End O' Year Fundraising 2013

This past year, 2012, our budget constraints were greater than ever before. The few tools that we sought funding for last Spring have had to be forgone for another growing season. Just a few hundred dollars would allow us to procure these items. Our work continues in spite of these constraints. We planted more seeds than ever and a few large trees were moved to their final destinations with the help of several great volunteers. Major changes have come to pass on our properties that both reduced the time we were able to spend seeking out new planting sites, but the streamlining and re-organization of the land we do have available for our use will allow us to grow more seedlings right here, saving us money, time and allowing us to get efficiencies of scale in our seedling production once again. Doing more with less seems to be our watchword the last few years, but this only means that we will be that much more efficient with the donations we receive in the future.

We have a veritable maple grove coming up that will need to be dug and potted in the Spring, but other than that we are down to a couple dozen potted trees for early spring planting. A long-term donor has found a home for them, but we were much too busy this fall to get them in the ground.

We have created a development plan that includes both a large scale reforestation effort in highlands near Lake Superior and a resort along the shore. Funds we raise now will help us continue to plant trees and leverage our good works into more exciting ventures in the future. The program for our school of sustainability is under development as well and when we open the facility it will be a living laboratory and example of how to operate sustainably. Our learning by doing model has served us well and a co-operative school that exists within a sustainable system is the best way to teach the elements and principles of deep ecology, green renewal and train the next generations of water bearers.

Several great friends and supporters of ECO-Tours have passed the veil this year and we are both missing them and memorializing their lives by recommitting to our mission. Some of the most important changes that we have seen locally have come out of expressions of their love, honor and respect for the future generations that will follow us. The trees we plant today have the power to outlive us and the relationships we forge with those who help accomplish our mission will, in turn, nurture other relationships that have the power to transform not only the landscape, but the lives of others, for generations. Although they may not walk the fields with us any more, their hearts and spirits are alive in the trees they planted, the memories they left us and the direction that their loving hands pointed us toward.

We ask those who have heard about our tree planting efforts to get on board, helping to fund it. If travel to Northeast Wisconsin is out of the question, contribute what you can to help us in our work. Donations are never squandered. Over 90 % of every dollar we receive is spent on trees, tree seedlings or tools needed to get them safely in the ground and through their first few years. Fields, forests and glens have been transformed through our efforts as well as the lives of those who have come on our plant-ins. One of the most hopeful acts we can participate in is the planting of a tree and in these times of rampant dislocation, instability and seemingly pathological destruction of nature, touching the Earth in this special way has amazing healing powers for not only the landscape, folks planting trees, our donors and the trees themselves, but for whole communities that depend on the structure, shade, water holding capacity and climate stabilization that trees provide.

If you would like to book an  ECO-Tour, or donate, please contact us. We accept checks at our home office as well if you are interested in sending money through snail mail. Post it to: ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. 1445 Porlier street Green Bay, Wisconsin. You can also donate through Paypal by clicking the link at the top left of our header.

To get an idea of how far your donations go, the average cost of planting a tree and getting it safely through the first three years is over ten dollars. Creating a copse of transforming a small glen could cost several hundred dollars and to recreate a full acre (.4ha) (about 150 by 300 feet) (46X92m) costs about three thousand dollars. Similarly, a single shovel might cost 10-20 dollars, but a subsoiler might cost from 200-300 dollars. Removing invasive species as a first step toward replanting native trees could cost thousands. For donors with deeper pockets, our dream facility is coming in at about six million dollars and if you are interested in funding at that level, we would like to send an executive summary of our business plan.

Blessed Be! In the coming year, may you find all the joys to which you are entitled and may the remainder of this one be good to you as well. Thank-you in advance for your support! Tony C. Saladino-Director

Gritty Gal From Wisconsin

A fellow blogger from Wisconsin writes about her trips to the arctic.I found quite a lot to like about this young lady's writing. Thinking through the experiences of another often sparks growth in our selves and the succinct dispatches from near the top of the planet have helped me to see my own place in the abundant temperate zone a little more clearly. I give thanks daily for my many blessings, but these posts just add a more profound appreciation for my nearby garden, the variety of foods that I can grow outside my back door and the nearness of loved ones that I can share the abundance with.

As winter is clamping down on the Great Lakes Region, our friends further north have been experiencing this for many weeks or moons already. Getting back to the land means many different things to many different people, but in the end, it is something we all must do if we are to become agents of change for peace and goodwill around the planet. I share many of my beliefs and attitudes here as an emissary for wildlife, for the water and for the trees, but my friend Aiden Campbell speaks on her own terms about her growing awareness of life in the remote and wild place that is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Blessings to her and may her path be beset with wondrous beauty, meaningful lessons and deep insight.

Diversity

There has been an interesting proliferation of the use of this word, especially in HR ("Human Resources") circles. The very nature of their use characteristic threatens to remove the soul from the word, but in truth, diversity is of primary importance to the understanding of our environment and how we might make peace with it rather than waging war against it. It is slowly becoming part of our collective consciousness, for example, that 85% of all bacteria are either completely innocuous to humans, or in fact beneficial. The billions of organisms who exist on the microscopic level in our air, on our food and on our very skin are part of an intact system we refer to as the environment. Even though most of us will never see them, they are as real and as integrated into our world as we are. The war that many fight routinely against them has had unintended consequences. In their attempt to eliminate all of these microbes, most of the beneficial and innocuous organisms in the kill zone have been attacked and eliminated as well.

This is tantamount to killing off the population of an entire country in a desperate attempt to eliminate a single family on each block.

Treating all "dirt" or any potential source of "contamination" as if it had the power to sicken us or kill us is leading to more and more resistant strains of bacteria. Keep in mind, the evolution that takes place in our species once per generation (about twenty years) is going on in bacteria in time spans so short as to boggle our limited minds. Perhaps as little as a few days. Tens of thousands of generations come and go in a relative blink of a human eye. In fact, there is a specialized bacteria that can only exist at the boundary between aluminum and jet fuel. This specific organism did not exist on planet Earth before the advent of air travel. Now, it has found a home in virtually every tank of aviation fuel on the planet.

The concept of diversity recognizes that we are interdependent on a very broad base of ecological fabric. Rather than strands in a vast tapestry, perhaps we humans are but a single fiber within a strand. When we are faced with only one of anything, the food web, or food pyramid gets turned upside down. I heard of folks who ate only grayling for an entire summer. It was the only fish that lived in the river that flowed past their encampment. They had no other food to eat and within just a few moons, they became depraved, seeking any other food as aggressively as a wild predator peruses a mouse, when big game has been eradicated. I love to eat pomegranate, but if that is all I had to consume I would tire of it quickly. Similarly, we must look to diversity as a cure for our desolation of spirit.

The biomass of bacteria, even though we humans are massive organisms, is many billions of times as great as that of our species. These organisms re the base of the food pyramid. They grow into colonies, fly on the wind, get carried by water and take up residence wherever the conditions are favorable. They help to break down waste, live in our bodies and upon them, assist in helping us to wrest nutrition from our food and yes, a few of them can kill. The diversity that helps to keep soils moist, allows tree roots to get their nutrient needs filled and provides for the higher levels of organisms to find their way in the world all rely on this world that lies hidden from our eyes. That certainly cannot mean that they are any less important.

As a first step, we need to understand the importance of this rich and diverse form of life. As we need to attempt to cultivate an appreciation of all other organisms. Once we do that, we can begin to honor and respect other creatures as belonging to other important parts within the tapestry of life surrounding us. Instead of a buzz word of exploitative forces, diversity is a reality that we must make a new kind of peace with, one that honors and respects all beings, form the microscopic up through the food web to top level predators. Just because there are bacteria that can feed on oil certainly is no reason to flood our wetlands or backyards with oil, nor is it a reason to hold out hope that after the destructive process of fracking, or wresting the last few drops from oil sands that the land will heal itself. The destructive forces that we continually unleash upon our fellow creatures need to be seen as the war against diversity that they truly are. Healing only begins when the fundamental right to exist is honored and respected. The more we learn about others, the more we will ultimately come to understand ourselves.

when we embark on an ECO-Tour, we always start with a spiritual opening and at the close we respectfully close the door to this magical time, so that we can begin again along our own path, respecting the brief opening of a window into greater realms than we may ever be able to fathom. Our ECO-Tours always touch the planet in a way that will live on after our organism has gone back to the Earth. Honoring the diversity of life that we have the power to feed is an essential quality of our tours. Great power resides in making this an integral part of all of our lives.

Flourishing

Ah, what a wonderful, oft overlooked quality and yet one that holds so much [promise for the future of humankind. So many conditions can hem in this state of natural abundance, we forget that it is achievable, sustainable and that exponential growth and abundance are actually a rule in natural systems, rather than an exception. Imagine, if you will, a forest. To make it a bit easier to fathom, try imagining a single acre (.6ha). In my part of the world, the temperate region, a common estimate for trees per acre is between three hundred and three hundred and fifty mature trees in a climax forest. To the average casual observer, it would appear to be in a relatively steady state. However, if each tree is growing a ring of new tissue each year, the number of board feet of wood in that acre would be increasing perhaps only by what seems like a small percentage, but multiplied by several hundred trees, it is quite a large amount.
Healthy ecosystems always have a certain rate of death and destruction as well, but in each and every case, the death of one organism provides habitat for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of other organisms. There is no trash in the woods, unless humans put it there. Each bit of living tissue becomes food or shelter for other living creatures upon death, sometimes in epiphytic relationships, the habitat that is provided by living organisms is mutually beneficial, or at least the death of the host organism is not necessary. There are thousands of mutually beneficial associations in nature and both creatures can flourish in the presence of one another. Forests are again a ready example of how this can work. billions of spores waft on the wind, in search of just the right moisture, temperature and conditions to make their life process possible. A single spore can ultimately become a non-plant, non-animal organism that stretches miles, if given optimal conditions. Fungi produce food for creatures, are primary decomposers and are often completely forgotten by casual observers because they spend the majority of their life cycle hidden amongst leaf litter and forest soils. the actual fruiting body is just a temporary phenomenon, peculiar in that it only lasts for time periods on the order of days, whilst the mycelium that the fruiting body (the part we see) grows from can live hundreds of years.
I know that many of us are anthropocentric, so finding ways to help our children flourish, as well as ourselves is perhaps slightly more important to most people than helping the creatures who also live in our environment to do well. One of my recent lessons came from an educational researcher who reminded me of the need to switch up a bit in child rearing. for decades, people have taught their children that they are smart, often repeating that mantra tens of thousands of times over the child's lifetime. This can actually handicap the child later in life because when they run up against challenges that do not fit into their skill set, they wonder why, if they are so smart, they are haviung a hard time solving the problem. Instead, we should take the time to use phrases like, "I like the way you approached the problem in a creative way." or "I think it was good to ask for help before you got frustrated.", phrases that instill a sense of curiosity in the face of adversity, adaptability over mastery. I used to tell my children frequently that they had good ideas, but that often the best ideas come from just taking a break, doing something different and coming back later so that they would have a fresh eyes to view the problem at hand.
Part of flourishing is to adapt, change and grow into new situations and that is something that natural systems excel at. Some things that we can all do to enhance the ability of one another to flourish is to stop consuming rampantly, step back from all that is sold to us, on every level. The only thing that flourishes under the current power and control structures are the wealth of the ruling class. We can see this at work in virtually every aspect of our "modern" life. NASCAR for instance encourages us to put the pedal to the metal when what is needed is a featherweight foot on the accelerator. millions are spent telling our daughters that they are overweight and unattractive when what they desperately need is self confidence. Politicians tell us that there is a one size fits all educational scheme that can be imposed on our children when individualized instruction has been proven to be superior on every level, save cost. There are even those (and you know who they are in your area) telling the fiction that government needs to be run like a business. Nothing could be further from the truth. Flourishing requires access to healthy food, water and shelter. Beyond these things, our species, as well as many others, require love and affection, the understanding and meaningful communication of other beings.
I have often said that I speak for the trees, but they are dependent on pure, clean water so I find myself speaking for the water as well. As we adapt and change in ways that help us in a single area, we find proficiencies in other areas as well, as long as we continue to pay attention and integrate new knowledge. Human beings are meaning making machines and we can do nothing else. If we accept what we are told, it will lead to the demise of not only our own selves, but the entire species. Well-funded interests are fighting to stay in charge, wrest the last of everything out of the Earth to make a profit for themselves. nothing will flourish under these conditions but the proliferation of lies that they will concoct to keep us out of their hair while the dirty work is done.
The Earth is in the balance and if we are to flourish as a species we must make peace with the natural systems upon which we depend.

Thirty Years Hence

I was barely twenty years old when the term "deep ecology" was being coined. Many of us had been on the same page about ecology and human interaction with the natural world, but some, in intellectual circles wanted a codified system of thinking about these issues that would fly in the face of the uberwealthy oligarchs who had run our planet under the wheels of "progress" for far too long. Although the reality that informed our perception exists worldwide, our thoughts about it seemed like isolated calls for change. What many felt would be needed is an over-arching platform on which to build social and political movements for change. The horrific dislocation of populations, the extinction of species and squandering of shared resources such as the food web, the air, fresh water, oceans and the soil  led many ecologists and environmentalists to seek a concise and precise way of elucidating basic principles for positive change. Out of this desire came, 

The Deep Ecology Platform.

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth, intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.

2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.

3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.

4. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.

5. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.

6. Policies must therefore be changed. The changes in policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.

7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent worth) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.

8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes.

—Arne Naess and George Sessions (1984)

The intervening years have seen more demonization, more vehement rhetoric, more finger pointing and more obfuscation of these ideas than we could have ever expected at the time. The monied interests found it easy to find examples of overzealous tree-huggers, eco-terrorists and anarchists who they used to paint the entire movement with. Dangerous as we were perceived to be for their bottom line, many of the ideas we brought to the table have yielded even more profit for their coffers. The scary, loose cannon, threatening hippies were few and far between, but the brush they used to paint us with was wide enough to gloss over any good ideas that sounded like they were in league with the "opposition". From the early days, there were those of us who came to the table saying, "We are not against anything!", "I refuse to take an 'anti'-anything status." or "Tell me what you are for." I am, and have always been, protesting for a desired future world that honors the planet Earth, her people, the creatures who attempt to survive here and the harmony that can be struck between the living creatures who reside upon or within the land, air and water as well as the inanimate objects that are often exploited for our (human) purposes. This distinction is often lost or obscured when powerful agents guide the discussion.

I would like to delve into each of these principles more deeply, but the mind-blowing fact is that once integrated into a coherent lifestyle, compartmentalizing becomes more difficult. It may take some time, but in the coming moons I will attempt to do just that, reflect and enhance the meanings that I have found from my association with the deep ecology movement. Millions of tree seeds have been planted with these hands. now, with the technology of keyboard and worldwide web, I will attempt to plant millions more ideas in the hearts and minds of humankind. Keeping in mind that humanity is rarely civil, frequently delusional and malleable, perhaps I can find the right words to resonate within the hearts of humankind. Lord and Lady know the future depends on finding a new way forward.  

Festival of the Dead

Many cultures honor their dead upon the moon of last harvest, the reaper is ever-present, but the influence of death subsumes the whole environment at this time (in the Northern Hemisphere) please pardon my out of step calendar to anyone living below the equator, likewise for readers in the tropics. Near the halfway point between the tropics and the arctic, my experience of days is noticeably shorter now than just a few weeks ago, hours have been lost in both the early hours and the late afternoons in ways that affect the rest of the day profoundly.

In preparing for the coming winter, there have been many more tasks to do in ever-dwindling amounts of time. This evolutionary as well as ecological experiences lead humans to consider our own mortality and that of our progenitors that date back across ages. The current boom in genealogy has reintroduced the family tree to many families that had all but forgotten their ancestry, at least for my family, anything back before great grandmothers and great grand fathers, had become a bit sketchy. Before coming to America. Those parts of our family were nearly reduced to a flag that currently flies over that country. Even the lifestyle and livelihood of great-grandparents was glossed over for the young. I hope that more of us have deeper understanding of our ancestry than that in the future, I think that part of the desperation and isolation that many feel are based on the fact that their continuity of the ages is not part of the awareness of many people. When we begin to honor the eternal calendar, we can do the same processes and participate in the same activities as the vast majority of the Earth's population have done since the beginning of time.

If we are lucky enough to be granted life, how we use that life can honor their efforts by adopting some of the ancient tools and techniques, the ones that worked for them that are still important today as well as discovering some of the ingenious processes that allowed them to give us life, we can work to change many of the things that have not worked so well in the very recent past. Being out of touch with the ancestors, or any of our loved ones that have passed the veil can be scary, but when we learn to take a our place in the chain of ancestry, we can rediscover a sublime power that is absent in many of our lives. The relations in my own family tree go back to India, Western Europe and Scandinavia (as far as I know). Each of these cultural groups have native populations that were subdued by forces unleashed upon them from afar. Their very existence threatened by raiders, missionaries, kings and marauders. Ironically, they all eventually landed in The USA, where the native people experienced the same things at their hands.

When we learn to respect the sacrifices and commitments that were made on out behalf, it can help teach us valuable lessons. Not only can we see through the current haze of what seem to be a million pressing issues into the very roots of our species survival. Gatherings at this time can serve to reconnect us with who we really are by investigating a bit about where we come from and honor the fact that each of us are presented an open page upon which to write our own stories. Many of the pagans I know observe this as the New Year celebration, entering into new commitments for the good of our community, pledging to re-open our hearts to the needs and desires of others and the eternal urge to leave something for those who we will eventually leave behind. With luck, we can also let things pass that refuse to serve, kill off that part of ourselves that is not contributing to our own good and plant seeds of hope under the dark earth.