III. Unci
Unci Maka, wopila tanka,
thank you so much for this incredible gift of life.
We are so grateful for the abundance you provide us everyday.
Please help us to see how we can begin to repair the damages we’ve caused, how we can heal these wounds of separation between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ how we can rebuild the interconnectedness of an existence
unremoved from the nature that created us.
Please help us to feel your love in our hearts,
especially those of us who are lost out in that other world.
Thank you so much for this path of healing,
for the strength you give us to persevere,
and for opening up our hearts to pray in this way.
Thank you for humility, patience, and understanding,
and please help us to share these things
with the world in a good way.
Aho, mitakuye oiyasin.
*******
Traveling in this freestyle manner that I do, is extra interesting considering that I don’t have good phone coverage, though, I am trying to get signed up for a new cellular communication family plan. I think I’m at the right address, no answer at the door though, could search for the vibrational disconnection of wifi radiation, but before I know it, Unci Carolyn comes walking up the road. So good to see her again, and to know that now we’ll have the proper space and time to actually reconnect on a deeper level, although this is by far the most colonized community I’ve been in since camp.
Pierre, SD, or fort pierre to be more historically accurate, the state capital, and she’s just a block or two away from four lanes of strip mall. Well, at least we should be able to find better food than on the rez, and we do, barely. The dakotamart has a four-foot wide organic section, and... nope, that’s pretty much all we could find. There was a fresh local produce market just down the street, and when Carolyn asked them if they carried anything organic, they just gave her a blank stare of perplexion. They seemed to not even understand what that meant.
"Never been asked that one before, of course they are, it grew out of the ground, didn’t it? We even ordered them fancy seeds from monsanto’s, you ain’t even got to spray them chemicals on there no more, them newfangled scientists figured out how to put the poison right there in the DNAs. Now if they could just do the same with the nuclear fertilizer, then we’d really be in bidness."
I think that this entire bioregion managed by king corn, is under his influence of toxic persuasion. It only costs a bit more for a bag of the upgraded seeds, and you get so much more yield with so much less work, so convenient, and almost enough to pull us out of debt this year. For this demographic to understand the importance of clean eating, would be to the detriment of the monsantofactured seed industry, as farmers began to feel compelled to plant actual food. Nope, it is imperative that these fine midwestern folk are lost in a fog of thinking that they’re living the simple life, even though they only eat the most complex chemical compounds available. And every time I saw a cart of Corn beside the road on the way here, I cringed, at best it’s poisoned inside and out, but there’s always the chance it’s some of the 3/5ths of our country’s Corn bioengineered for industrial usage only.
So now we’ve converted several states to the exclusive production of monocrop, completely erased vast expanses of vibrant ecosystem, murdered any chance of any other animal ever eating again as we claimed complete ownership over every drop of life rained down from the Sun, and then we use even more of it to build more machines for destroying more ecosystems. And somehow we still think that we’re the most intelligent species.
We have managed to refine our extraction techniques of maximizing the capital removed from our planet, and we know that it’s ‘our’ planet, because of our superior evolutionary adaptation of drawing squiggly lines and pretending they mean something. And our imagination truly is our strongest character trait, not only can we make up abstract concepts like symbols that supposedly mean stuff, or paper scraps that supposedly mean stuff, or governmental societies that do mean stuff, but coupled with our supreme thumbpower, we can literally imagine the future and bring it into existence. We have the power to manifest reality, with our minds and hearts and voice, and our hands, but we’ve forgotten how to build anything but fences.
We do still love to imagine the idea of nature, it’s fun to sit inside and watch tv shows about it, at least until they’re picked up by the history channel. We even reserve national forests just to look at, though they are operated by the US department of agriculture, and the forestry service is there to facilitate selective logging and nepotistic contracts. There’s also a full-time road crew always at work, endlessly carving new paths to overlook all the pristine nature, but if they stop paving, then they’ll stop getting paid.
*******
I mean, that’s what the whole thing’s about, right? Civilization, progress, economic growth, and the classic trades are the build up on the surface of the Earth, as we construct a cage of asphalt and concrete that chokes her out. Carpenters, roofers, painters, and my own lineage of electricians and hardwood flooring, the most respectable crafts as Bob the builder builds america, developing boring old ecology into beautiful sprawling suburbs.
Grotesque amounts of my brothers in the tree nation had to take the fall, but at least this one’s from a sustainable forest, I mean a tree farm, yet another grid of imprisoned monocrop with one species in mind. Forests have complexly woven biological conclusions, thousands of species compose an incredible equilibrium of diversity and abundance. Tree farms are akin to that lonely row of Corn, packed in for max yield, and devoid of any microbiologic connection to anything other than the gene that creates telephone poles. Tree farms are not forests.
So do you like the other option better then? Clearcutting? Demolishing a proper forest and erasing the blueprint of evolution, but at least now there’s more free land to develop into our high-rising housing complex. I bet in the Lakota language, one born of the Earth, that our concept of ‘developing’ the planet would translate into words more like ‘homicidal devastation,’ and they’d probably reserve ‘develop’ for the zillions of years of universing that perpetually progressed the growth of the forest that you just sent to china.
The mindless expansion of our civilization is overpowering the Earth’s ability to sustain us. There are more than six times the amount of empty houses than homeless people in america. Nearly twenty million vacated premises. Why on Earth do we need more? Nobody that can do anything about it, can, because it would be their own livelihood at stake if construction slowed. And what a sad trap that they don’t even realize they’re in, synonymizing money and life, but that’s life, gotta make a buck no matter what, and even those that see the destruction directly associated with just about every occupation ever invented, they still have to check-in to babylon to make ends meet. How else am I ever going to own enough property to build a big brand new american life and escape the woes of the world?
It’s just a job, gotta get paid somehow, and if I don’t do it, somebody else will, might as well be me making that money, although I sure didn’t think I signed up to shoot at peaceful protesters in exchange for a paycheck. And the indians welding the pipes make about fifty bucks an hour, highest wage around by far. While coal miners pass a billboard on the way to work that assures them of the best local treatment for ‘black lung,’ yet they vote based on keeping their economy healthier than their people. Or their mountains. Don’t worry about junior though, he hardly spends any time outside in the fog of our coal dust settlement, he’s been chained to the screen instead, as he mines things to craft into bigger things to mine with.
Economy’s sucking? Just build more infrastructure. Bail out automobile giants to get the union’s vote, even if there are more cars than people on the planet. Definitely don’t bail out the people though, the housing crisis might put some on the street in front of the empty foreclosures, but we need to save some fundage to bail out the banks later.
It would be nice if the word ‘profit’ had anything to do with saving the future. War for profit. The enslavement of life, for profit. The ecocide of development, for profit. The putrid pollutions of power consumption, digging and fracking and pumping and extracting and nucleating and even stealing solar rays and windjamming the airwaves, for profit.
I’m all about some super techno free-energy explosion, should probably be in moderation since I bet it still breeds laziness, and I bet the vibrational hum of the fridge still affects you. I think the key, is just like with the food, gotta get it locally. Electricity from the grid has to be sent out at five times strength in order to power through the journey, it’s like increasing the acres of nebraska dedicated to your food by 500%, and the accompanying emissions required to get it there. Or you could just fill your yard with edibles, step outside to pick what’s for dinner, and process your own food with convenient solar panels on the roof. Or a bicycle alternator setup. Or any number of personal electricity-building mechanisms that don’t provide much, but if you’re busy living, then it should be plenty.
We have to reduce our usage. It has grown to be obscene. We should only be using the electricity that we can personally produce. Unless maybe we had a neighborhood powered power station, that supplied the neighborhood with free electricity, but only what you could carry home in your convenient backpack battery pack. I bet we’d begin to ration the endless flow spewing out of the pipeline, like a village naturally does with fetched wood and water, and we would start to slow down the crashing of convenience as it became obvious how inconvenient it truly is. We need to live locally, and in community, not outside of our means. Again, just like with the food, it makes perfect sense when you consider the levels of devastation required to export another ecosystem’s piece of planetary energy.
*******
Another toughie though. What can one do while they’re plugged into the power grid? Certainly takes money to break free from the hardwired dependence on the same electric companies who brought us the hum of electric appliances, as we whistle at the bill. Though bicycles are everywhere, and I heard there’s a surplus of scrap alternators soon to be floating around.
Here at Unci’s, we use a few lights, the stereo, charge phones and the computer, sparingly pump the AC into the tiny late august cubicle, plus the fridge. At Sun Dance, I was in a tent, but the community hub cook shack had a light and chargers, plus coffee of course, and a fridge. And at Ben’s - light, phone, vitamix, fridge.
Well, solar powered lights are easy, they charge all day and come on automatically when it gets dark, simple and cheap, just like me, or just hold a candle to that one. Personal electronics, I say ditch ‘em, but any wind-up mechanism is enough to generate a few likes. So it seems that the toughest to overcome is the most necessary component of life - the refrigerator.
It takes a lot of juice to keep your juice cold, to preserve your way of life, to ensure that the food you harvest doesn’t go bad before you can eat it, but how else could you rationalize living in such excess? It’s so convenient though, and it saves us from wasting our styrofoam doggie bag of the literal remnants of overeating. At the farm, the fridge was fairly plain - milk, eggs and fruit - and maybe a little leftover tidbit to nibble on in the morning. But everything else we ate, got picked fresh each day. But who else in america has this opportunity? Not even many farmers.
How can you survive without an icebox, when everything you can afford comes from your grocer’s freezer? How could I have cheffed it up at any other camp in the world, without the unlimited frozen food aisle? How can a consumer in america keep all of their saran-wrap and tupperware and ziplocks and endless waves of plastic packaging cold enough, so as not to leech volatile chemicals into their intoxicated food supply? How can I possibly convince anyone to give up the undeniably convenient device that my favorite room is literally built around?
So, maybe we can’t live without them, in that case, we need to create their power locally, redesign them without profit, reduce their anti-vibrational output, and probably just make them smaller. Everything has to be smaller really. Less. We have lost sight of the cost of living this way, to a point of blindly building bigger than before. It takes way more electricity for the larger model, but I’ll just have to work a few extra hours away from my family each week to afford it, and the money is all that I really consider about energy consumption, or my overtime in the coal mine.
We can’t continue to live in a system that enables the false concept of monetary value to exploit the finite health of our planet and people. If you couldn’t simply buy more electricity, if it was as limited as our endangered home, if it came in five-gallon buckets instead of direct pipelines, you might start to hold sacred every drop. Prioritized moderation and a much more mindful approach, sometimes the solar panels cut out before dinner, sometimes the last jug of water is freezing, are you sure you need to use the final drop on pizza? Yes.
*******
Pretty strong testament to the air conditioning of america, that within just a few generations, we now see it impossible to live without a recent addition to the lifeway of only a fraction of the world’s elite. So, you’re saying that Aborigines don’t keep their Cucumbers cool? That somehow an entire planet of original cultures managed to survive without a maytag repairman. Well, in our defense, it does seem to be a bit warmer nowadays.
We had a root cellar at camp, and as far as I know, it kept our tubers pretty cold all winter long. And my hawaiian co-chef told me about their ingenious indigenous version that kept the feral Chickens from getting too spoiled. Half hut and half dugout, plus some genetic engineering from the heart of the ancestors, not the wallets of the walletmakers, wait a second, is money just a scam to sell wallets?
There’s tons of techniques for preserving food that don’t require this modern day machine, and some of them even make it easier to swallow, like, somehow these traditional cultures had some kind of ancient wisdom about how we were designed to interact with the world around us.
Lacto-fermentation has been used for thousands of years to preserve food without electricity, plastic, or even the destructive process of sand-mining for the mason company. It creates a probiotic product that helps along our digestion as it improves our gut flora, in exact opposition to our most beloved gluten, which is extra interesting because it also breaks down pesticides, like the brain-melting Round-Up that’s genetically engineered into america’s wheat. It greatly enhances the vitamin vibrations of our food, tastes great in hippie favorites like kimchi, tempeh, and yogurt, plus a fermented diet suppresses cancer growth.
No big or anything, it’s just the killer disease that seems to have been on the rise ever since we stopped the traditional process of lacto-fermentation, which simply doesn’t jive with plastic packaging, because the living biotics must be able to breath a bit. Nothing close to empirical evidence or anything, the empire has clouded the issue with far too many carcinogens to ever narrow our minds down to one. Though, the broad brushstrokes paint a picture of the wild abundance basically curing cancer, while the macrowaves of modification manifest it. The grocery store is killing us, good thing they have a pharmacy built-in these days.
*******
But this lacto-fermentation, isn’t that just gonna take a ton of milk and fencing? Not necessarily, the “lacto” is for lactic acid, and it is totally achievable with no dairy whatsoever. Some people do use the whey, and obviously stuff like kiefer or yogurt are gonna require a Cow’s contribution, but maybe we can get the symbiosis thing figured out with the bovine beauties after all.
The Mundari people of south sudan, yet another traditional culture who seem to be much more mature than our infantile insistence on instant gratification. They understand the importance of letting the Earth’s cycles flow, they’d never build a dam to extract her lifeforce at the expense of another’s, so they wouldn’t build a fence for the same reason either. And they drink milk every day.
Oh, so they’re herders, huh? Well, only in the sense that they are friends with the herd. They migrate together, they follow the herd, not in pursuit of meat like the Buffalo parade, they’ve got a deal worked our for the créme de la créme. They hold the herd sacred, they are family, to a point of offering daily massages to their sisters, and they also use their urine as a medicine for its highly antiseptic properties. And the Cow crap keeps getting deeper, except that they leave no trace of waste, they burn the feces to ward off insects with the smoke, and then the remaining ash acts as a further Mosquito repellent as well as another strong antiseptic. And they’re all 6’6”, and still evolving, except that now, our ways of war and property are trying to infiltrate any remaining indigenous cultures still hanging in there, so now they also have to protect the Cows from landmines.
But they always have fresh milk, just enough in fact, the perfect amount to drink before it spoils. Plus, they’re constantly surrounded by other abundant foods, because the Cows only travel to places of proper vegetation, seems they’re not quite as dumb as we thought either. If we surfed the amber waves of grain as ripeness swept across the land, we’d always be able to walk outside and pick food to eat, that’s how it’s been done by countless ancestors, I mean, this one time we even evolved feet to follow the food onto the land.
*******
Another trick to eating gourmet, one that doesn’t require nomadicism, is simply a seasonal menu. Get it while it’s hot, eat it while it’s at its highest vibrational state, and next month you’ll get a whole new ingredient list. Saves all that fridge space, and also saves the farmspace depletion of all those inferior foreign countries, as they grow inferior foreign replicas that require a barrel of oil per bushel, and just so that our grocery stores can provide instant gratification, to their bank accounts.
Eating locally is so vital, to both science and faith, and that also means eating from the local timeline, you can’t expect to eat a six month old Banana without feeling a bit queazy. (unless maybe if it was fermented) Eat what’s there, don’t eat what’s not, seems to be a pretty proven method. Sure, store some stuff for the tougher months, but don’t work twice as hard to force a crop that’s only half as strong.
And open your eyes to what is out there, winter or not, there is something edible outside right now. We have to lose our misconceptions about what is food. We don’t have to eat grass and flowers all the time, I love all that other stuff too, but we should be educated enough that we don’t go hungry when we realize that it is ecologically destructive to eat outside of our means.
And I’ve got an even better idea than following the dairy, although that’s a pretty giant step towards the garden of giving that I’m headed for, but how about if we just follow the ice? We could migrate with the thaw line and enjoy a spacious walk-in cooler, plenty of room for everything, though I guess there’s probably less to put away in a perpetual snow melt.
*******
And who am I to judge another’s frugal freezing of accounts? It’s much cheaper to buy in bulk and stowaway, plus there’s less polluted packaging. Even though I’ve dropped out of economics, when I’m living within the cage, someone is paying the price of filling my stomach. Here, it’s Unci, or it’s her gracious government’s assistance, but there’s no thought of scarcity, she understands that my path of moneyless manifestation has brought me here for a reason. She doesn’t hesitate to feed me, as I didn’t back when when our roles were reversed. She feels compelled in her heart to support her family as they continue the work we began last winter. She would rather starve, than to see her loved ones getting trapped by the machine that chews them up faster than the Earth it plows under.
Though, as much of a joy as I am to be around, I’m also just a convenient distraction while she deals with the actual cages around her actual family. Everyday is filled with calls to prisons and governors, still not sure who’s more racist, though my first hint is the seven years that her son is facing, for an empty Marijuana capsule that was purchased legally just two states away. The depressing part isn’t the bit about his baby’s due date being before his court date, it’s when we uncover the web of profits that provide the jurisdiction to enslave the locals, as we copy and paste colonization over top of their freedom.
But I just got into town, plenty of all that stuff later, you got any weed? And she did, of course, but just a bit. Probably enough for a south dakota death sentence, but with two OGs like us, we’ll be out by the morning. On the rez, all you can get is brick weed, the seedy dregs of a compressed Cannabis unseen in america since the nineties. No news here though, our country offloads all of their substandard pharmies onto third world nations, the same nations we spread disease into as we suck the health out of the land. But in pierre, we don’t have a guy, and you can’t even walk into a store for organic Strawberries, let alone a scrambled brownie.
We don’t let it slow us down, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, and the next day we’re scraping bowls, and the next day we’re melting an old cartridge, and the next day we don’t even try. Not a story of desperate fiends, but a comical tale of a sweet little grandmother and her transient companion, as they pull out all the injunuity they can muster. But enough is enough, we’re gonna find some buds today.
We have a few missions about town, so I dug my Grateful Dead shirt out from somewhere, but I thought that... oh... whatever, hippie. It really is the ticket to finding the one hippie in a sea of hipsters, or electropunks, or racist red states, though it generally attracts those also in search of heady nugs. Now if I just had those purple corduroys.
We grab a Squash from her neighbor’s house before we go, out of a giant Squash patch that has replaced half of her front yard. For serious? Way to go team. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s the exact thing I’ve been talking about. She recognized that a growth of food to share, was a far better use of her time, energy, love, land, and even money, than some legal grass that society won’t even let you grow out. So we walked by her front yard and picked a Squash, yet another dream come true, now if we could only have rounded out our meal as we rounded the cornerstones of colonization.
*******
Neither of us drive, which means that we walk a lot, but we also rode on this pretty unique bus system. She would make a pick-up appointment the day before, and they would deliver her door-to-door for only a dollar. It cost a bit more for my youth, and a far higher premium for same day service, but for her, it was a super affordable method for delivering all of her money to the prison system. The driver was friendly, he also had been feeling a disconnect happening in the world around him and yearned for a change of pace, but he had responsibilities, payments, gotta suck it up and burn some gas to stay warm this nuclear winter.
He said that the only way this bus can afford to operate, is through government subsidies, the civilized support of progressing infrastructure, and maybe it’s even an ecologically economic transit solution, except that we were the only two on the otherwise empty bus. I’ll assume that it’ll gain speed and eventually be full of folks with unique trajectories, that would certainly take far longer to travel, but quite possibly preferable over navigating the metro. And then, we just have to power it with clean energy, and do away with the destructive practices of rubber harvesting that have decimated over a million acres of rainforest, which just don’t seem to be bouncing back anytime soon. And then if we can stop the rest of the consequences of manufacturing from infecting our planet, and if our square cars didn’t plow through every lifeform they come in contact with, well, the vehicle of motorization might be cool if we can figure all that stuff out.
We are all related, even that cloud of Bugs were my brothers, and how many could I possibly have killed by riding a sacred Sunka Wakan? We simply have to slow down. Slower travel, sure, at least here at the ground level, but we have to drop the entire concept of 'faster is better is bigger is wider is longer is deeper is cheaper and just a more economical gouge overall.'
Before we had machines to make clothes, we made them all by hand. Every designer pair of anything was a one-of-a-kind handcrafted piece of art. With personal love. Certainly varying qualities, though I’d imagine there were some pretty talented folks back then, and an inescapable attention to detail as you fidget with a pair of socks for days. They weren’t made to be the fastest, or the cheapest, they were made to be the best they could be, made with the pride of true craftsmanship, with love, and even more so if you knew that you were giving them away. Things were built to last, because it just wouldn’t make sense to design them to be disposable, I can only make so many pairs of art with my heartbeat, so you better hang on to these for a while. And that was no problem really, it’s not like you had room for a whole drawerful to lose in some electric dryer, plus, the Sun does that for free anyway.
But on the horizon, was the looming decline of decent apparel, the substandard fruit of mechanization that quite blatantly prioritized quantity over quality. The machines would never recreate grandma’s fingertips, so they didn’t even try. It just has to function, and not forever, we kinda need them to keep buying socks, otherwise we’ll never be able to sell as many as the machine can spit out. You outta see this baby go.
It’s not just the threads either, it’s across the board. Our consumer class is fundamentally based on reducing costs and increasing sales, the profits of quantity over quality, a one-time-used business model that enables the disposable income of economy over ecology. Like food, just think about the corners they must cut off of their ingredient lists, in order to continuously meet their shareholders growing expectations.
How can it be healthy to consume a diet balanced on your budget? Or even the ‘healthy’ snacks with primo ingredients, I bet they would have loved to put even more good stuff in there, but there’s only so much that a whole foods yuppy is gonna pay for granola. It’s simply not efficient to plant food by hand with love, it’s much more marginal to use a machine of disconnection.
An economic system that rewards manufacturers for cheaping out, only lessens the quality of life for everyone, as it stretches the pockets of the suits - see, that just wouldn’t have happened with a hand-stitched humanity.
*******
Our pockets were still pretty empty, though we did make it to dakotamart for a couple of organics, some egg roll wrappers, and the stuff for frybread. I’d only made it a few times since camp, I did have a really good top secret recipe though, even if the vague amounts kept me guessing as much as you. I had it writ