“Make safe our journey, through the storm”
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Ok, so that all sounds pretty fantastic, a perfectly seasoned buffet of fresh feral foods, but what about the seasons we spend in the freezer? Not everyone can live in a year round tropical paradise, are we to sustain ourselves on frozen steaks and snow cones? Now that we understand the evils of excess, how can we stock up for winter?
It’s a tough one, the fine line between harvesting your family’s fair share, and sharing the feast with the rest of your family. I look to those who have held onto their instincts of ancestral wisdom. The knowledge of how to live in a good way, which has been passed down through tradition and DNA since the beginning of life on Earth. We have much to learn from the intuitions of the animal nation, as well as the harmonious balance maintained by many indigenous cultures across the globe. At least until we wipe them both out.
So WWID, what would the indians do? I know first hand about the harsh north dakota winters experienced by the Lakota, and I know that they ate meat. The packed-in protein of the Buffalo was essential to their survival. It was sacred. But could it possibly have been their sole source of sustenance? It may have been the majority of their caloric content, but the fruit of the plains provided the medicinal nutrients to keep them on the hunt, and I know for a fact that they dried Choke Cherries into tasty little patties that carried them through the extended season of snow days. Or what about my more temperate appalachians, certainly reliant on game and frozen forest finds, but wouldn’t they have collected caches of calories to save for snowy days too? How did they navigate the grey area between abundance and excess? We know that their language didn’t even contain the word 'mine', so how did they determine the ethics of equity? Was it really as easy as finders keepers?
With their connection to the intricate tapestry woven by the complexity of life on Earth, they understood that we don’t own the planet, and they knew the importance of sharing the wealth. They employed healthy harvesting techniques that ensured the proliferation of their community. There’s plenty to go around, so they didn’t feel the need to load up every last morsel. Doing so would have inhibited the growth of the very populations of protein that they would be hunting as the days grew shorter. And the more that we invite to dinner, the wider spread the success of our vegetative state. We can’t collect ‘em all, we have to leave enough behind so that the plant nation can continue down their perennial path of providing.
It’s easy really, like with the Basil plant on the farm. I can grab enough leaves for dinner each night without worry of a bland tomorrow, but if I harvest every single leaf, the reduced photosynthesis of the power plant will have a hard time keeping up. So we always leave some. We pray to our plant sisters with an offering of Tobacco, a transfer of energy that keeps the cycle spinning. Many can still hear the song of the Earth, which provides guidance in maintaining balance, but even those who are disconnected will feel the benefits of believing. As you thank Unci Maka for everything that she provides, while focusing inwardly on patience, humility and understanding, you’ll see that the rest of life is actually living, and you’ll genuinely desire what is best for all.
It’s like the group of monks that a water protector told me about, they tend to the local Banana orchard, but they’ve devised a simple way to give back to the community. They don’t pick a single Banana from the trees that make up the perimeter of the crop circle. Those trees easiest to access from the outlying ecosystem, are left unpeeled and served up to Grandmother Earth. To all walks and flights and slithers of life. A sacred offering to Wakan Tanka, or God, who is in each and every one of those hungry Japanese Beetles.
Our intelligence may have made us the fittest to survive, but the only way it will last is if we start to think about the big picture. Like how I’ve been thinking about glutenless acorn flour, haven’t gotten to make it yet, but I will. I’ve been studying the process, which includes a fairly extensive river rinsing to remove the high level of tannins from the nuts. Tannins occur in many wild foods, something we domesticated out as we pumped up our appetites, and then had to pump on pesticides to replace the naturally occurring predator deterrents of our imprisoned prey. We can use these same tannins to tan our Buffalo hides, which makes me wonder about another consideration, could there be a correlation between a colonized diet and the unfair skin of the white man’s world?
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Now that’s just nuts, which there seem to be plenty of, but how can I be sure to ensure that filling my flour jar doesn’t empty another’s? If indigenous insight isn’t enough, perhaps we can look towards nature’s world of native wisdom. I know that there is no fundamental fallacy with a policy of putting away, or squirreling away as it were, a quick glance outside shows me just how natural an accumulation of acorns is to the local ecosystem. They somehow know precisely how much is needed to persevere, and they don’t take any more. No access to excess. That would just be rude to the rest of the rescue rangers.
And what about my little honeys? The Bee’s knees? There were four or five Bee boxes down the hill, but only one was buzzing with the occupation of colonization. This was Sara’s excuse for visiting the farm, and even though we found time for all those other activities, she still managed to do her homestead work of harvesting honey. Local honey, so freaking delicious, and a source of sweetness with actual health benefits, as opposed to the refined tastes of sugar addiction. But just how ethical could the extraction of this natural resource be?
Sure, we box them in, but they’re free to come and go as they please, and their commute is quite crucial to the comb. The hives were fenced in too, but that was only to keep pooh Bears and nosey Cows out of their business. The defender of domestication has a little ammo, and it’s hard to argue with the propagation of the pollination population. Certainly we are responsible for their receding beeline, so doesn’t that mean that we are responsible for fixing it?
They're a keystone species, like humans used to be, and an intricate ecology is woven wherever they decide to set up shop. They are conduits of communication, they spread the vibrational web of our Earth song, and make audible the undertones of our mother's buzz. They are so tuned-in to the frequency spectrum, that a simple snap of the fingers will send a shockwave that signals their cue to leave you alone. And after I was a few weeks into my own attuning, I sent a double snap to a pesky pollenator, and I kid you not, she fell straight to the ground.
This network of nueral vibration is a real thing, it composes the building blocks of all the real things, and vibrations naturally flow through curves, not angles. Our entire civilization is built upon the practice of caging our existence into the compartments of containment. Cubicles within boxes within skyscrapers within city blocks, and somehow we find ourselves disconnected from anything even resembling harmony. And here we are, floating our mess downstream, as we encase the queen into this gridlocked prison of frequency disruption. The real kicker though, is that they’re not even native, we introduced them to kickstart the agricultural revolution of america.
But even still, does that rationalize us raiding their reserves? Well, the beekeeper will tell you that they produce more than they could ever need. Now, that doesn’t sound right. Are you telling me that this law abiding citizen of natural order, is living it up in a lifestyle of excess? Even with their dwindling sense of direction, could this species possibly be lost to the temptations of greed? If I’m reading into my six-legged sister’s advice column, how can I take away anything but a quart of their sticky surplus? Have the habits of the hive mind just flipped the poles on my moral compass? Short answer – that’s about as likely as me ever providing a short answer. Obviously I prefer a pallet of intricate sentencery, like the life sentence of droning away in service to the king of queens.
On one of my early days at the farm, I helped Ben smoke up the buzzing Bees as he added a story to the high rise condos. The last compartment that he’d added was almost full, so we had to make room for more inventory. Or what? Well, if they filled the entire warehouse, then their biological clock would alert them that they had enough supply to support the crew. They’d stop making honey. They’d migrate, or hibernate, or just spend more time chilling with their family, but we extend their sentence with another cellblock to fill. The entire ecology of the farm benefits from their presents, so of course we want them here, and it’s totally natural for an animal to eat another animal’s food products. Plus, in the wild, I bet the honey raids tear up their homes, so doesn’t it make sense to offer them the protection of slavery?
But beekeeping is an ancient practice, as old as the written language, agriculture, civilization, the patriarchy, and the pyramid scheming slave masters. Honey was used to trade as currency, and Bees backed the flipside of the earliest coinage. To give up on honey, would be to give up on money, and all the good stuff that came with our inherited privilege. I do love it though, especially this batch, so I hope we can work something out, but I’m not quite ready to call this version symbiosis.
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The Ants were though. It was a daily game of hide and seek with the honey jar. Even with the lid on tight, they’d somehow find a way in, but it took them a couple days to find it. There were Ants all over the kitchen, in a few spots at least, and they had domain over the compost bucket. No way we’re gonna kill them, we’re buds, plus we know that they’re just harvesting their fair share. We should be happy to break bread with our brothers, I’m sure their contributions to the neighborhood have more than paid for them to bus our table.
Everyday before we ate, we made a spirit plate with the choicest nuggets of each dish, we prayed and thanked Unci Maka for all that she provides, and then placed the offering on a stump in the yard. Offered it to the spirits, our ancestors, seven generations back and seven generations forward, Tunkasila, the Sun, the Moon, the stars, and most importantly our mother. We believe that the spirits are hungry and will be better able to guide us if we share the abundance, our ancestors are the world around us, and they enjoy it when we honor their contributions of life, but we don’t get upset if Ants line up at the taco truck, we know that they’re just taking the plate back to mom.
The Ants are God. And Mother Earth. The Ants are made of the universal energy of the Sun, as it powers this incubator that we are not confined to, but rather, we are a part of. We are not foreigners to natural wonder, we are but beings of small perspective inside the inner workings of our all powerful planet. And she’s sick. We became self-aware, then self-absorbed, and our egos convinced us that we didn’t have to work for mom anymore, we’re the new head of household. She got sicker all around us, and so did we, but instead of trying to reconnect and ask her for advice, we just locked ourselves away in the angular cells of our concrete tumors.
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Plants are connected to our planet, very obviously, vital organs to the cycles of a living Earth. When I speak to them, I feel as though I am speaking to the Earth herself, a direct vibratory connection between my open heart and the open arms of my creator. And the animals that live among them, they feel it too. They are all listening to our mother’s lullaby, and their direct physical connection to her, keeps them tuned-in to the understanding that we are all one. We are all part of our mother. A tiny tiny tiny little speck of a fraction of a part of a piece of her, yet so incredibly capable of making great changes to her physiology, which directly affects our own. But here we are, turning her into a construction dumpster.
It makes me sick. All the concrete. I don’t mean the moral dilemmas of sidewalk chalk, I’m talking about the vibration-blocking slabs that make up the foundations of modern civilization. All you gotta do is sleep on an Earthen tipi floor for a while, and you start to hum her melody. Dreams become more vivid, sleep becomes more restful, the circular shape is conducive of inducing a strong resonance with the energy of the planet. I know that this connection is real, I’ve felt it, and I’ve felt it fade away upon re-entry to our boxed-in existence of concrete and squares. It’s really just science. It’s all stuff I understand pretty well through my past life of turning knobs.
Vibrations. Sounds. Songs. Waves. Energy. Universal communications that are most certainly inhibited by twelve inches of subterranean sound barrier, and then diffused as they bounce around in the corners of our acoustical nightmares. We have concrete knowledge of waveform behavior, yet our behavior has all but removed us from the radio frequency of home base. Unless you’ve felt this connection flow through you, then you’re probably laughing at such a preposterous idea as a living planet that communicates with the cells of her heavenly body. I get it. Especially after countless generations stacked on the fractured foundation of a world ruled by man, and the accompanying ridicule of the unevolved heathens who worship all of life as one. An indoctrinated disgust of those who draw power directly from the source, which somehow justifies the injustice required to electrify the fences of oppression.
But you don’t have to make the leap to tipi living in order to jumpstart the flow of Unci Maka’s energy inside you, all you really have to do is dig your toes into the sand and you’ll begin to feel grounded. Literally grounded. Electrically grounded. Connecting your skin to the skin of the Earth, allows the flow of the negative ions she emits, to flow through you. It makes your entire being function on a higher level, your mind, body, and spirit, it scientifically connects you to the energy field of the Earth. It’s also way healthier for our broken backs, a barefoot approach centered on the balls of our feet, but the capitalization of putting rubber to the asphalt, enabled nike to change our stance on the issue. Also enabled the posturing of western medicine, as they play the savior, by inventing psuedo-cures to problems that we created in the first place.
But we are the conductors. We are in charge of letting this energy flow within. Through physical contact with our environment, coupled with the pathways of an open heart, we can realign our vibrations to a healthy and harmonious way of life. I talk to the trees. I share my adoration and love. I tell them about our global movement of recovery. I promise to look out for them as I thank them for everything they do for us.
I don’t hear voices of response, though I do know many who have, what I feel is an overwhelming sense of warmth and love flow through my body. I perceive it as a direct connection of energy with whichever tree I’m conversing with, an acceptance of my love and a reflection of it. Who knows though? Maybe I just feel good inside because I’m pouring out love as I humble myself to another. But perhaps it’s something more, like a rudimentary connection to the song of the planet. Unable to translate the lyrics, but the emotional intent of the chord chart has no language barriers. This is undeniably a love song. As much as I want to deepen my connection with our mother, to a point of true understanding, I already feel enough to know that I must dedicate my life’s energy to restoring hers.
Just like all the cells in your humanly body, dedicated completely to maintaining a healthy lifestyle, we are the living components of our celestial body. We are Earth. Every species of life is an organ of our mother, we are quite literally organisms. Each organic specimen of each specific species, is one cell of many, that make up the whole of that particular bodily function. That flock of Seagulls may have about as much clue of their purpose in life as their kidneys do, but they all play their part in creating a functioning infrastructure for their host. They don’t have to try to grasp the grand plan, they just follow their genetic code, and get firmware updates through a healthy connection to their local energy grid.
Obviously we’re the skin, the largest organ that covers the entirety of the planet, riddled with festering pockets of oily residues, but for the sake of a future dig at alcohol, let’s assume the role of the libatious liver. The whole of humankind is that liver, tasked with helping our creator to create the most comfortable living situation for the entirety of our being. You’re just a cell of the liver of the planet. An independent piece of a system that our mother’s health is dependent on. Those liver cells don’t need to translate brainwaves in order to understand that the purpose of their existence is to better the world around them. They instinctively want to work towards the greater good, which in turn, betters their own living situation. Acting seemingly autonomous, yet in choreographed harmony with the intricate design of the fabric of life.
If a few liver cells get sick as they become disconnected, no big deal, the organ still functions and life goes on. But if the sickness overtakes the collective, then the destructions of this one species of cell will begin to deteriorate the quality of life for all. The body will break down.
And what if the liver were to gain sentience? What if its cells began to believe in their own superiority, as they lost their grip on the connective tissues of their community? They would assume that their survival was of paramount importance, even if that meant suppressing other bodily functions, or depressing the function of the body as a whole. They would commandeer excessive energy, which would propel their own population, while putting a chokehold on every other organist at play.
And God forbid they start learning how to harvest the lifeforce of their neighbors, devouring healthy cells of functioning systems while poisoning all passersby, and all in pursuit of conquering the whole shebang. Spreading systematic devastation as they take control, complete organ failure. You'd think they would sense the ramifications of their hostile takeover, living in a broken being of dysfunctional families, but they might just use their surplus of resources to build a city of scar tissue, only furthering their disconnection from 'the one.'
The same 'one' that they’re attempting to overthrow. A cancerous overpopulation of parasitic cells, intent on operating the mainframe of a fully conscious being far beyond their grasp of understanding. Like a smidge of bacteria born yesterday, experiencing only a sliver of a fraction of a portion of a ten-thousand day timeline, does seem a tad unlikely that the dimensions of their capacities could possibly conceive of any underlying sentience. And their body of work would be deathly ill. Something drastic would have to occur to rebirth equilibrium among the internal affairs. The suppressed members of the immune system, those who stand for the health of their creator above all else, will stand up and revolt against the widespread destruction of this toxic superiority complex. They have to, before the rest of life is turned into livermush.
Our planet is sick. We are responsible. She will recover. Will we?
We must resume our role of caretakers, not just takers. We’re the next step of planetary evolution, an almost infinite utility belt of intelligent designs. On paper, it was a good idea, evolve a species with the brains and heart and a thumb to be able to create global superpowers. They’ll still be a part of the same supreme being, so of course they’ll integrate with the others, and certainly they’ll be accessible through the same musical notation.
And we were. For a long time. Human beings were just as connected as anyone else. Singing their part in the song of the planet. Living by the drum, the heartbeat of the Earth. Keepers of the fire and water. The rhythms of life perfectly timed with the cycles of our revolution. Not bound by the restrictions of a 9/5 time signature (one that shifts a measure halfway through each verse), their biological clocks were synced up to that of their home. As was every other species. They lived by indian time, and without the divisions of hard labor, their internal metronome kept them aligned with the cycles of life. Sun cycles. Moon cycles. Water cycles. Motorcycles.
No watching the clock at a dead end factory job, they were on the Sun’s schedule, which by coincidence, offered them an abundant source of the vitamin D wavelength. No marking a colonized calendar until rent was due, they looked forward to the solstice instead, and their bodies were naturally tuned to the lunar month, some of us still are. Even our year is off by six hours. Trying to cram a square grid onto a dynamic flow of circular motion, may make it easier to get employees to work on time, but it will breed a society detached from reality.
Or you live in a round tipi, a non-destructive domicile of nomadic nightlife, with free daily downloads of our mama’s favorite tunes and a complimentary sunrise wakeup call. As you reconnect with the Earth, your life cycles will begin to sync up to hers, that part’s for real. It’s science. The natural rhythms of your body adjust themselves to fit into the groove. Cycles within cycles within cycles, all stacked into a precisely portioned harmonic series.
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Let’s refresh our understanding of sound logic. With an audio waveform, we can visualize the vibrations that are shaking our eardrums. Every time that the wave travels up, and then down, and returns to the center line, it has completed one cycle. I picture this as a parabolic squiggle on an obsolete high school graphing calculator, but it could be seen as the profile view of a spiral, a pattern of circular motion combined with forward trajectory. Each revolution a cycle, and almost reminiscent of a closed loop, but not quite.
Or we could sketch the reverberation of a guitar string. When you pluck it, it travels back and forth, and appears to be in both places at once. Each cycle looks like a football, connected on either end, and simultaneously at both extremes in the midpoint. So it looks like a human eye. Now let’s keep pretending that we’re talking about music for a bit.
So in music, there’s a harmonic series of notes that harmonize with each other. In science, the cycles just line up. Strum the bottom E-string and imagine the tone of its spiral, we have to zoom in to see its football stats because this note beats with 82.4 cycles per second, or htz. Next, play the E an octave higher, exactly 164.8 cycles per second. So two cycles of our new note, or two footballs end to end, fit perfectly inside a single cycle of our original tone. The next note of the series produces three nesting dolls of vibration, and so on. Each note’s cycle set beginning at precisely the same point, and reaching completion in unison, at the far edge of our original E’s football. This image is commonplace to the audio professional, but even with a tin ear, one can understand the synchronistic relationships of complimentary vibes. If just a single note is out of tune, the entire orchestra will seem to be malfunctioning.
We are the orchestra. All of life on our planet. Every species humming their part, composing the song of Eden, layer after layer of harmonious life cycles, all tuned to the root note of our conductor. The Earth has its own resonant frequency. Vibration. Energy. I’m not talking about some hippie crystal power, I’m talking about science. The planet is vibrating, she’s singing to us, it’s just hard to hear over the incessant white noise of the disconnected human racetrack.
It’s 7.83 htz. Mom’s hum. Science calls it the Schumann resonance, the literal sound wave being emitted from our revolving home. Our living planet’s frequency, or the rate that it pushes energy out into the universe as it vibrates through space, is the same energy that it uses to push its own evolution. Our evolution. The fundamental building block, the concrete foundation, of every living vibrational being, ever. (On Earth at least.) Just being within earshot, out in nature, you start to feel the calming effect of recalibrating your physical self. So, on the flipside, it only makes sense that a way of life locked away in a concrete cubicle, would be detrimental to the rising anxiety levels of a high-rise lifestyle.
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And what about the delusion of time? 7.83 cycles per second? If this was such an integral vibration, don’t you think it would be in harmony with our time clock? If it were exactly one cycle per second, then I might start to come around.
Our constructs of time, are also an easy to grasp concept of cyclical nesting. There’s sixty of this unit we call a second, in every minute. Sixty tiny football cycles embedded into each larger minute cycle. Zoom out and see sixty minute cycles fill each hour. Twenty-four hours in a day, just enough time for a revolution of our planet. Arbitrary amount of days in a month. Twelve months in a year – a single trip around the Sun. Of course years into decades, into centuries, into millennia, and I don’t see what this has to do with anything. Sure, all of the cycles line up at the end of each larger cycle, it would certainly corrupt the space time continuum if one species of the minutest seconds began decelerating their revolution, but it all fits together nice and neat, because we designed it that way. We took our fluid movement through space, the natural ebb and flow of an orbital timeline, and dissected its digits until it fit neatly into the claustrophobic grid of your corporate timesheet.
A day, that’s easy, one complete spin on the Earth’s axis. Although it seems that those who live by the sun, experience a ‘day’ as an ever-changing amount of time, a fluid schedule as the stars align to energize us with a golden shower. Then we chopped it all up at random, twenty-four segments, that sounds good, then split those into sixty, and then those into sixty, and it must be good because the math all seems to work out. Like, how to milk the most out of a minimum wage workforce. Now we can quantize and commodify the human vibration, regardless of our spiraling orbit and its variable sunlight.
We invented time, it’s not our fault if the Sun didn’t want to play along, or the Moon for that matter. We separated the days into groups of varying lengths, or months, supposedly based on the lunar cycle, but that’s a twenty-eight day thing and there are thirteen of them in a year. Coincidentally, a woman’s monthly cycle is linked with the natural cycle of the Moon, not the contrived grid of a patriarchal calendar.
A natural system of harmonious spirals, will no doubt see cycles beginning and ending at synchronistic points. Instead, our ridiculous twelve page flipbook, the one that squares off against the complexities of our celestial spiral, it gets to the end of a trip around the sun and there’s a quarter of a day just sitting there. There’s screws leftover boss. No biggie that this grid we’re aligning our way of life with is out of sync with the entire universe, we’ll just tack on an extra day every few years and call it good.
There is a natural order of things. Things happen in cycles. Bodily cycles. Planetary cycles. Celestial cycles. Cycles within cycles within cycles. They are all connected. It’s what the entire study of astrology is founded on. Here’s our Sun, spiraling around the black hole at the center of our galaxy, eventually completing an entire revolution, and only taking 250 million years to do it. Our planet is spiraling around that Sun, even as the Sun is in it’s own spirographic orbit. The graphical spiral of planets chasing the Sun, is quite obviously a wave of sound as we sing our way through space.
The Earth spins to create a shorter cycle, and the Moon moves our double-helixed lifeline as it spirals out of control, just a few inches every year though. The consciousness of our planet experiences the waves of the Sun and Moon cycles, the days and nights, and the changing seasons. But the eyes on the ground see what’s really going on. No foreman calling the shots, though everyone seems to be right on schedule. Flowers bloom and leaves fall, thousand mile migrations and winter long slumbers, a never-ending cycle of life perfectly attuned to not only our mother’s heartbeat, but to the vibration of the even larger composition that guides her journey.
An incredible symphony of interlocking spirals at every level. Harmonious space waves of general relativity. And then we came along to butcher it, box it up, and bring the human genome to market. You can now sell your