Trees are a most wondrous creation. They are the intermediaries between heaven and Earth. They touch the untouchable ceiling, yet they are rooted to the core.
Trees bring life into fruition. They interpret the dreams of the Sun, through the heart of Unci Maka. They exude the apple of the eye of their creator’s most vivid fantasies.
Trees are the ultimate vessels of water. They branch out in all directions, as rivers come together. Among the flow of their limbs, can be found a map to the stars.
Trees are a wealth of knowledge. If time is taken to listen to their leaves, they will tell a story far greater than the pages of any book.
The trees of our planet play a far greater role than simply creating the oxygen that we breathe, they are among the wisest of our relatives, and the backbones of our being. Just as they scientifically facilitate the flows of Earth, water, fire and air, they are also conduits for the unseen energies that breathe life into this world. Only by rebirthing our connection to the trees of this planet, will we be successful in healing the waters of Unci Maka.
*******
Speaking of trees, I had now arrived in a land of conflicting legalities. I was free to purchase the medicine of the Earth without prescription, but the recently relaxed laws of the logging industry, had enabled widespread clearcutting and the conversion of forests into tree farms. It was now easier to attain permits, and more profitable to perform the ecocide, and even the hazards of the road were increased as the speeding trucks were paid per load, and incentivized to squeeze the maximum amount of trips onto the narrow mountain passes. And just as with the pipelines that I may have mentioned earlier, the tree carcasses were en route to the land of ports, where they would promptly be exported to china.
Sure sounds like a fair trade, the clearcutting customs of providing raw materials, as we import cheap knock-offs of a quality life, but selling our trees to purchase our floors is no way to walk on this Earth. I personally know from my previous life in industrial woodworking, that the all important job market has been drying up for decades, as it becomes increasingly cheaper to send german equipment to china, as well as american hardwood forests.
And there’s the european training consultants who teach the unregulated underage workforce how to not cut off their hands, who then load flooring and furniture onto a boat, for a return voyage to a country that would never allow their tiny fingerprints to pass through the customary walls of separation. It’s one thing to be proud of the american-made exploitation of an impoverished land’s ‘natural resources’, but how can the patriots of the greatest country in the world, be willing to cut it down to size and hand it over to the commies? Oh yeah, money, duh.
Gotta have it, makes the world go round, and as we cut down the world to ship it around the world, it becomes a small world after all. Used to take eighty days to circumvent the globalism, but I just coasted across the country in eighty hours. And while all it cost me was a pack of smokes to keep my sanity, plus a slice of pizza for a brother with a bud, it was not because of greyhound’s “hippies ride free” policy. My gracious host funded the excursion, and was mostly reimbursed by a team of ashvillians who would pay anything to see me leave, so it seems I was the conduit for both import and export taxation.
The pricelines of the itinerary also compounded interest due to my travel deadline. The rush and rush to get things done. There were instances to be gratified. I, of course, don’t make plans, and therefore I’m ever late, but somehow precisely where I’m supposed to be at all times. This last minute flight change though, meant that my journey must be expedited to a fast-paced eighty hours, in order for me to get to work on time. Otherwise, I’d just have hitchhiked.
It was one of the new and few tricks in my bag, would have made for a much better story, and I wouldn’t have arrived as discombobulated as I did after three days of bus lag. I have experienced the blissful connection of traveling at a human pace, along with the spectrum of techno-travel that evolved from our very first foray into invention. The wheel. Skateboard to bike to dirtbike to motorcycle to cubed-in car to cramped-in coach seating, and as you become more isolated from the scenery and speed past the outside world, it has a jarring effect on your being, as your spirit seems to lag behind your material self.
But even me, the leisurely nomad, still fell victim to the ticking time bomb of colonialism. I certainly could have said no, I’ll get there when I get there, who cares if it takes me a week of walking adventures to arrive at the next step of the journey? But then I would have missed the most epic reunion of Rosebuddies in the history of water protection. And you know I had to be there, Rosebud won’t go hungry on my divested account.
*******
Still somehow on time, I rolled up as they had one waiting for me, a little surprised they remembered my scheduled arrival, though if Ziggy had managed, then I guess anything’s possible. Two of my close brothers were there, you already know Dean, who was in charge of this shindig, and Randy, who I didn’t at all expect to see outside of the rez. This is about to be unreal. As promised, I’m going to be elusive and confusitive about the identities of my family, but just know that throughout my travels, I’ve seen all but about ten of those who I mentioned in that last piece of work.
And once we’d booked it back to the compound, Dean presented me with a most incredible welcome home gift: A water protector bandana/illegal-facemask, some heady crystals, a tub of cannibutter with which to chef it up, the glass piece I’d left at the tarpee and assumed to be bulldozed by the national guard, and the very first edition of a printed copy of my very first book.
Wow. This was so cool. I’d only ever seen it on the screen. This was much easier to read, not as overly thick as I’d worried, and way more magical to randomly open a page up to. I was overtaken with gratitude as I hugged my brother, who had been reading his copy, and luckily agreed with my take on his character.
Oh, yeah, I guess I’m going to have to see all these people again, hope I didn’t offend anybody. There were certainly a few honest portrayals, but I think I left it vague enough that if one were to recognize themselves through what they considered to be negative character traits, perhaps that would clue them into a subconscious yearning for self-improvement. Plus, we’re the only ones who will know who’s who, and we already know how you are.
More brothers and sisters excitedly popped in for hugs, though most would arrive tomorrow, and then I caught wind of who was crashed out on the couch - geez, can’t seem to shake these two. It was none other than old Tokey Smokey and Unci Carolyn, now we got a party.
So nice to be back around the family, especially in a setting without the heat of the militarized blizzard. With the exception of those I’d seen at Sun Dance, I’d been out of sight, so I think I took a few by surprise. “Oh, and I hope you don’t mind sleeping in the bus outside...” Actually, that somehow still sounds pretty great.
*******
The weekend’s events were good medicine, for sure, a chance for much healing and reminiscing about that time we survived the apocalypse together. And of course we ate good, cookies, brownies, a chocolate fountain, and that was just the edibles. But enough about our private affair, it was by invitation only, so maybe you better leave before the flood rolls in.
The next week brought even more reunions, and nobody else seemed in a hurry to leave, especially after we got the go ahead to put up a lodge. Our uncle showed up to pour, Randy headed up the construction crew, which turned out to be quite the undertaking in the wetlands of the rainy season. We went on a mission for Willows to build the frame, which we were going to assemble in a literal mud pit. Made a floor of fallen wood, packed it with sawdust, covered that with black sand from a covert beach operation, flooring of ferns, a layer of burlap, and then a top coat of Cedar. High and dry, and I was pretty impressed with how well it turned out. We had a bunch more burlap to build the shell, then some blankets, and finally a giant canvas that had made the return trip from Standing Rock with Dean. Authentic memorabilia, nice.
And it was nice to be able to bring my brothers and sisters back into ceremony. Some had been to Sun Dance, but most hadn’t sweat since camp. I was already feeling the two months I spent in colonization, I can’t imagine the level of disconnection that must have been brewing in those whose path had not kept them connected to ceremony. I also know that my good fortune was of no coincidence. I didn’t simply luck into a year of prayer, it was my commitment to the prayer that had kept me walking in this way, and had me traveling through the circles of healing that continued to build this growing connection to spirit.
My unwillingness to ignore the call of my heart, and the certainty that I felt with every step into the unknown, had enabled me to recognize when my prayers were being answered. Like when I found myself at the farm. Prayer was the focus there, as well as clean local food, so my single prayer and single song were able to be multiplied exponentially, by the vibrations of a community as committed to this way of life as I was. Which took me to Sun Dance, hello, somehow a place where I was even more connected to this vibration of life. And every time I gave myself over to spirit, and each time I shed the material belongings that weighed me down, it seemed that I was given even greater opportunities to grow my power of prayer.
Including this trip. I’d been in colonization just long enough to share my heart, and to feel it growing anxious about escaping the cage, started praying and hatching a way out, gave away the last of the stuff, and now I’m here setting up another lodge with my closest of relatives.
Can’t talk about the prayer, but it was a good one, and the rest of the night brought merriment and music and dancing and good times all around. And then it got weird. A sister was overtaken with something, she went into an altered state and began freaking out as she warned us that, “The next is coming.”
Um... yeah... about that... Maybe some thought it was a psychotic break, but I assume it was a connection to an energy that genuinely sent warning of something big on the way. But I didn’t blink twice - because I’ve already had the same vision.
*******
The next week brought a different vision though, a much more catastrophic image than the destruction of civilization, a few of us took a headtrip out into the devastated expanses of the clearcut. It was possibly the grossest thing I’ve ever seen. How could anybody possibly feel good about doing this to a forest? I’d heard of clearcutting before, but nothing could have prepared me for the carnage I was walking through. Even my premature assumptions were bad enough, I had imagined a field of stumps, which there were, big stumps, grandmother trees, four and five foot wide some of them, those that the rest of the forest would keep alive through the roots, except that they were all gone too.
As we started into the wreckage, there were roads for the trucks, and on either side were haphazard piles of the trees too small to sell. Then, as we traveled deeper into our exploration, we had to navigate over these springy webs of fallen five-inchers. I guess the heavy equipment just drives right over top of this mess, the dying bodies of my brothers in the Tree Nation.
It was like this for as far as you could see, a miserable wasteland that used to be a mature forest with five foot trees. Dean said that when he got ‘his’ five acres, it was surrounded by hardwoods as far as you could walk in a day, and now it’s an island of nature amongst a sea of the most grotesque woodline imaginable.
The neighbors apologized profusely, they had no idea it would be anything like this, they probably thought ‘clearcut’ had something to do with the check they were getting. And I doubt that the logging company was too specific, on not only the complete annihilation of life, but also the despicable way in which they would leave the land. “Oh, yeah, it’s sustainable, we’ll replant rows and rows of a fast growing species, no worry about that, monocrop tree farms sustain plenty of financial futures.”
Plus, there’s probably just enough degrees of separation between the purchasing agent, and the lumberjacks who are willing to leave a forest in this condition, so that way the sale of logging rights goes through with plausible deniability. Like with pipelines, the guy who writes the checks assures the farmers that construction won’t be any more destructive than a tractor, and then a path of infertility is poured through yet another family farm, while monsanto’s profits go up. But hey, the indians didn’t even get that empty promise.
We could still hear chainsaws in the distance. Dean said they started at six every morning, for months, he just stood at the edge of his space and shook his head, but Paul Bunyan didn’t even realize he was doing anything wrong. Just doing my job, sir. Making america great again. And good news, this trade deal with china not only got us four american jobs per four acres, but since we’re exporting it all, we can tack on another bazillion to our grossest national product.
A protector who had been living out here for a while was ready for action, ready to lock down, or whatever the next level is. There wouldn’t be much incognito Mosquito, a commune of hippie activists right in the middle of vandalized logging equipment, what a coincidence. Or we could go up in the trees, but they’re technically not doing anything illegal, only immoral, so it would be hard to get any outside support, when others sitting to stop the misuse of eminent domain only receive the notice of eviction.
Plus, they’re cutting the whole forest. With a pipeline you only have to block the path, here they could just go around you. I guess if you had enough people up there you could halt the demolition, but the ultimate goal, has to be to get the state to rescind the law changes that enabled this disgusting business deal to go through. Wonder how many concerned and dedicated citizens would have to stand up, and climb up, to sway the executive branch into action? There’s got to be a number, a ridiculously high one maybe, but how many voters is enough to outweigh the purchasing power of the lobbyists? Unless they just charge us with felonies like in Standing Rock, then we can’t vote anyway, just like all the black pot smokers. Well, I did say the next book was about action...
We finally came down from sitting in the trees, in a saddened state of unfairs. Even if you didn’t feel any connection to nature at all, this still woulda felt like a hurricane to the heartland. We could argue the ‘more homes than homeless’ angle, private property and rental investments and the building up of america, converting fantastical forests into the american dream of progress, but how is this good for anybody but china? Certainly no flag toting american would like that idea, they look far too much like the indians.
*******
And even more indians were stunned by my frybread skillz, Randy especially, though once he saw me making it like a grandma, he knew I had it on lock. We had gotten here on the same day, so we ended up roommates on the bus, and then in a spare square inside, but I’d much rather have been in a tipi.
Minus the conical home, the place was still a proper hippie compound. A house, a few buses, a camper, a big army tent from camp, Chickens and Ducks and almost as many Dogs as people, one was even a Standing Rock vet. There was a central barn-kitchen-garage chill spot, Randy and I opened up a mechanic shop for the convoy, worked our way up to pulling an engine, and almost got it to crank back up.
Tons of projects to keep us busy, and games, and art contests, and jumps and spins and stunts and stuff, and it was a regular old powwow. Not quite, but we did make it to seattle for one, indoor due to the hundred and twenty percent chance of rain, fun time, though it was way smaller than the Rosebud Fair had been. Also made it to washington’s capital building, state not DC, for a plea to the government to refuse permits for Puget Sound Energy’s illegal LNG pipeline construction on treaty land. Seems to be some kind of pattern.
Some of our local Rosebuddies had been arrested the previous week as they set up tipis on the front lawn. They managed to stay there for a few days, but the unarmed sleeping women were eventually raided in the middle of the night, by fully geared up riot cops. We gathered inside and sang a few songs, a few politicians poked their heads out to do some politicking, and then we bumped into even more water protectors on our government mandated smoke break.
The coming weeks saw a steady flow of water protectors at the commune, and that’s really what it was turning into. We all worked together to run the show, cook and clean and garden and what not, we had finally brought the family back together and nobody wanted to see it end. Can’t just one thing be permanent in this world?
*******
Seems that permanence is even less of a thing in this wet environment, anything made of wood will start to rot much faster than in the dry air of the plains, so you have to paint it all. We put a shower into the shop, but don’t they know we’re dirty hippies? And in the off-chance we used it, we had to paint each piece of wood framing.
It’s the ‘right’ way to build something. If it’s worth building, it’s worth building to last. And if you’re spending that kinda money, and hard work, then it only makes sense to build it strong. So we coated each piece of biodegradable two by four, who were only a couple bucks each due to the falling prices of our brothers at the tree farm, with another miraculous product of the dupont chemical corporation. So now it’ll take way longer to ‘rot’, which sounds way less glamorous than to ‘continue the sacred circle of life’, but at least the water based paint is super safe to manufacture, and to dispose of, and to decompose into our groundwater.
Of course, even the dumbed down EPA classifies paint as one of the top five hazardous substances, it’s full of chemicals like formaldehyde and arsenic, which explains why it causes the same cancers as cigarettes. But without it, we’d just be pouring money down the drain, which I was asked not to do with the paint cleanup, because it would clog the pipes, but what exactly is washing it outside gonna clog? Or the oil based polyurethane that we used for the exposed wood, just looks so much prettier, excluding the animals that encounter a nice new clear coat. What’s the difference in coating water pipes with oil and putting oil pipes in the water? Scale, certainly, this was just a gallon, not the 400,000 of the latest leak, but if everyone coated their tipi poles with a gallon, we’d have eight billion floating around as the flood rolls in.
And in the garage we used a tube of gasket maker and a can of starting fluid, based on the way they smell, I can’t imagine that either are too eco-friendly, but it’s just what you use to fix cars. There’s simply not an eco-friendly alternative, because cars are simply not eco-friendly. So how righteous can my new career be, if I’m only further enabling more cars to be on the road? Or am I decreasing the need for more cars to be produced?
A new car takes 40,000 gallons of water to fabricate, plus a bunch of chemicals and plastics and emissions, but the important part is that they’ll give you a better interest rate as they lock you into the roll cage. Plus some people just gotta have the latest greatest automobilia, how else will we know how successful they are? So there’s always demand, and always used cars sitting around junkyards, and some are even still built to last, which the oil-based government took care of, when they offered incentives to crush old cars in order to bail out the crashing auto industry. For a country so insistent on letting the free market dictate direction, doesn’t it seem amiss that every one of our major product lines, only turn a profit due to the interference of government subsidies?
Cars are the biggest killer in the country (excluding slaughterhouses), and they’re killing the planet. So instead of weaning ourselves off of them once we’d manufactured enough for every person to drive themselves crazy, we opted to destroy the most affordable ones and crank up production. It’s not even just the billions that auto lobbyists spend to bribe the government, it’s also the worker’s unions that they will be speaking with during the next election cycle. Gotta save the most american jobs, what are we gonna do, drive some ching chang japanese hybrid? Though now even ford has had to break the bonds of their petroleum partnership with their own hybrid model, of course, way back in the beginning, Henry himself told us that alcohol was a superior fuel, yet the only option we’ve ever known was a cupholder for a cornfed coca-cola. Enjoy.
They’re not gonna stop making cars until they are forced to. Business. But supply and demand has no affect when we openly rig the market. There’s no real effort to move away from oil until we have exhausted every drop, but even a cornfed engine would be hazardous to the animals it encounters, plus, even the roads themselves are toxic to the flows of our planet’s moving life cycles.
From the outside, or from an atlas, our vast road network is quite blatantly an asphalt cage that is constricting the Earth. Even without the cars, this web of tar would stop the migration of life dead in its tracks. A chicken may cross the road, but the high speed interweb of tree roots and microbiology, can’t. The roundabout of life is about far more than just the Deer in the headlights, or the Salamanders that the Erenbrooks helped break through to the other side. It’s ninety-nine percent composed of creatures that we can’t even see, let alone understand the effects of pouring pavement all over.
And of course her vibrations are held back by this cage, but at least she can send a seismic test to break herself out of that one. No, once we stop repairing them, the roads will not last forever, that’s easy to see from the sinkholes she’s already been using to swallow our pride. But we can’t stop repairing them until we get rid of cars, and we can’t get rid of cars until we get rid of jobs, and we can’t get rid of jobs until we get rid of rent, and we can’t get rid of rent until we get rid of the banks, and we can’t get rid of the banks because they own the government, so the government has to increase spending on interstate infrastructure, in order to ensure their permanence in this world.
So we either wait until we run out of oil, or until the collapsing economy and the uprising black waters become too much for the government to bail out all at once. Or, maybe we realize that the only thing meant to be truly permanent, is the death grip of debt that has enslaved our species since the invention of time, and that the only way to free ourselves from this prison of profit, is to burn the whole thing down. Or just the money.
*******
And the sweat lodge was hot enough to melt most of it away, though it took a few rounds of tweaking to get it properly steamproof. Randy and I tended the fire. There are as many ways to build a fire in this world as there are to pray, approximately eight billion. There may be certain protocols for putting together a peta wakan, but each firetender has their own flair to it. It was an honor to learn from Randy, a close brother who held me in his heart as he shared his personal philosophies of understanding.
I don’t see the differences in my mentors as a device to separate their teachings, but as a way for me to find my own way of life, through the strength of their combined vibration. And this way isn’t going to resonate with everyone, I learned that one from Randy, so as much as I want to share my journey and bring others to the inipi, it just might not have the same life changing effect on their being as it did mine. It’s probably gonna do something though.
Uncle poured another lodge, but this time when it was over, Randy and I stayed in for a fifth round, a Buffalo round, as close brothers shared the deepest of heart vibrations. When we returned to the house, the vibe was joyful, commonplace after a good sweat, generally a little more on the chilled-out side of the spectrum, but it all made sense once we eyed the recyclable beer cans strewn about the table. There had been alcohol around the whole time, not all the time, but steady. No worries, it doesn’t bother me to be near it, though some of our indian brothers can’t say the same thing.
But there is no room for alcohol and the lodge to mix. That would be a big no-no. But nobody was drinking before the ceremony, so no official line was crossed, though it takes until the next day for the vibrations of the inipi to fully set in. Like at Sun Dance, where we stayed around for at least four days of purification, gotta let the prayer really sync into your own internal frequency. Alcohol dampens your vibration, your internal light, it clogs the conduit of your spirit. We don’t bring it in the lodge, but we shouldn’t really drink it afterwards either, especially not if you hold these ways sacred. But not everyone does, and that’s ok, so Uncle and Randy and I went off alone and smoked the chanupa, to officially close out ceremony, as we sent our prayers out to Wakan Tanka.
*******
Uncle went on vacation the next day, so when Randy shot me a look and said, “You wanna go sweat?”, I jumped at the chance to have a closed lodge with my brother. Men and women can go into the lodge together, we generally sit on opposite sides and it creates a nicely balanced energy, and prettier singing. But there’s something special about a men’s only lodge, as I know women to feel about their own, and especially with only the closest of brothers in there, as you’re really able to open up to the stones in a much deeper way. Plus, with only the two of us, we didn’t have to feel like we were hogging all the steam.
Before we headed to the lodge, I was out front singing that thunder song, at least until I saw a storm cloud rolling in. Randy told me to sing a different song and pray for the weather to hold out for a bit, at least until we got the fire started. We’d been learning some new songs together, Dean had even gotten us a drum, and it turns out that I was actually getting pretty good at singing, for a white guy. And Randy’s knowledge of the language, was helping me begin to understand what I was sending out across the airwaves.
Randy was a bit younger than me and still learning these ways, as we all are, into eternity, but he’s well on his way to becoming a strong spiritual leader for the community. He’d poured before, but only for those close to him and already familiar with these teachings, which includes me, and I was honored to be able to sweat with him as he continued his progress of prayer.
It turns out that starting a fire with wet wood in a drizzle, is not exactly the easiest, even if you can do it in the snow. We had a pretty good go at it, a struggle for quite a while as we fanned the flame, who wore us out and humbled us before the ceremony had even begun.
I was just starting to consider it a sign that perhaps we were not meant to sweat today, no time for coincidence to start happening now, but then I realized that it was quite the opposite. We were being put to the test. Our commitment to the prayer was being strengthened, as long as we could manage to endure the adversity. No one else was coming, it was just us, there was no real pressure to sweat and no one to let down but ourselves. We could have just given up. It was raining. Nobody would have thought twice, we just sweat yesterday, so what’s the point?
But we’d made a commitment to pray. We’d built a sacred fire. This prayer was in our hearts. We’d put the grandfathers on the cradle with Tobacco, and invited the spirits of the four directions to hear our prayers. You have to want to pray, nobody else can make you, and the more you genuinely desire to connect to spirit, to need it, well, that’s