Buffalo Heart

I drove with friends Pedro and Layna, Kayla Jo and her new boyfriend Dan, to the Gaian Mind Festival in South Central Pennsylvania at a place called Four Quarters which is owned and run by a mysterious Quaker man named Orin, who wears a straw hat.

My head is still swimming from the experience, a pagan inter-faith tribal gathering, a Dionysian riot, a dance, a forum of future thinkers and psychedelics, popping ecstatic entheogens, an artistic, Eros-suffused, trance-infused Native American be-in. Pan was there along with Soma, so was Athena in her cloak of wisdom, and Artemis darting through magnificent pines and hemlocks. Of course Venus was there too in all her beauty and Mars, to find Venus. Raven flew overhead, dropping his wing and pointing the way, and Quetzalcoatl's green tail could be seen slithering through the tree branches. Buddha and Ganesha meditated at a concert of Drums, while Shiva danced, and Krishna made love. I talked with them all, walking around, they displayed their identities in costumes of every hue and song from every land. A thousand Irises wove dandelions in their hair, and sylvan bosomy Goddesses from every state laid down in fields of nettles to make love. Of course the mushroom was there too, networking everyone and making the knowledge of things conveniently known before they happen, but the energy at the place was the energy of a tribe, people who I'm sure I've known all my life.

Shri Peyote was there too, and Sandoz's marvelous creation in abundant tabs that spread invisibly through needy hands stretched across on the dance floor. Ecstasy ebbed and flowed through skin and fingers and lips of ten thousand supplicants of some being that had yet to reveal her true identity, perhaps life herself.

Electronic trance thumped continuously through the groves of conifers, At night the music and lights bored a mind-altering beat into the cerebral cortex, adding to the whatever unintended effects came from peyote, psilocybin, acid, ecstasy, or if you were uncool, uppers, downers, coke, or God help you, booze. The festival was supposed to be for psychedelic worshipers, dedicated to a transcendental fusion of nature with psychedelic bliss, an embrace of Gaia brought on by altered trance state, intensified by percussive beat loud enough to shake the earth, and audible to farmers over a mile away.

Of course you had to get there by car, and leave by car, and it lasted only three days. One or two left by ambulance. There was a young Russian who began gyrating wildly beneath the strobes, then lost his balance and fell, and began convulsing. I applied alms, took him out of the lights, gave him water, cooled him off - he had a fever. Two sober paramedics from the local hospital arrived in yellow raincoats and bore him away.

A crowd from Philadelphia began mixing pills with other drugs. The old-timers were confused. This was supposed to be about knowing what you are doing!, they said.

Three days is a long time to dance without a break, so after the second night of hip opening gyrations under the stars, I repaired under a bleak sky to some blankets and a tent that were somewhat dry, though not level, and slept until early dawn.

The roar of music, thunder and lightning woke me to a scene reminiscent of "War of the Worlds". It did seem that aliens had invaded during the night. Poseidon had decided to soak the place thoroughly, and Poison Ivy had sprouted in the place of Laurel. Aside from the electronic beat, which played to a near desolate trance-scape, by early light a few Celtic fairies with purple hair and nose-rings wove ghostly threads through the megalithic stones that circled the wet pine-needled trance floor. They were oblivious to the inclement conditions, obedient in their solitary paean to a God, who must yet still be asleep.

Even Zeus showed up and whacked the place a few times after dawn for good effect, putting the fear of death into weekend campers. A few scurried out to their cars. The land we camped upon was vertiginous, and spilled water down and around all eight thousand sleeping bags and tents to a siliceous muddy stream populated with hemlocks and oaks. Where was the energy of the weekend headed? Clearly it was headed for the River.

So I headed for the river and saw that John the Baptist was there too, incarnated as a Native American healer, named Buffalo Heart, who was running a sweat lodge ceremony down by the water.

He is exactly the kind of person his name implies, powerful, warm, healing. He invited me to share tobacco with him and advised that I do the sweat lodge four times. I've had bad experiences with tobacco the few times I've tried it, nauseous vomiting, a feeling of being poisoned. I was afraid of that, and I told him. I am aware that tobacco is a sacred herb, and that the tobacco that is used by people today does not do for them the good things it did for our native people.

But the way Buffalo Heart mixed his tobacco had a ritual to it that I knew was long in the making. He worked only with his right hand and drew at least seven kinds of tobacco from different pouches and rolled this massive cigarette for me to smoke. After I inhaled a bit he told me to put it away and take it home with me. After that we smoked from a pipe. . . a long one with a big round bowl at the end.

Artemisia, Coltsfoot, Bearberry.

He looked like a Brahman in his posture, the way he put the tobacco down with his right hand. He repeated phrases and blessings in his language and told me what they meant.

Buffalo Heart told me about the first time he smoked, with a Hopi shaman that gave him his name.

"He had a pipe with a bowl the size of a melon, and he took handfuls of tobacco from his pouches which were big as handbags, and pushed them in one after another, tamping them down and adding more and more. Then he drew a flaming log from the fire and lit it and shoved it into my mouth and commanded that I breathe. He made me draw lungful after lungful of smoke so thick that tar was pouring down my face covering my chest and making me completely unable to cough or think. I took breath after breath. The tar was coming out of my mouth out my nose, my eyes bled, and I was black from the smoke. My heart raced and was on fire and he commanded me to take more, take more. Then I sat in the lodge with him four times and felt the tobacco leave me in the sweat.

"Then at a gathering in Virginia where he was the medicine man, mostly of people who were Cherokee, he stood up and said, 'This is Buffalo Heart, he is now responsible for you all ' and then he died . . .

"I've been Buffalo Heart, doing sweat lodges ever since"

I told him I was interested in the story of Raven, and Rainbow, and then he took some tobacco of his and put it in a pouch and gave it to me and handed it to me in a way that I will never forget. The pouch had some crazy writing on it, and it was robins egg blue, and I still have it. Something attracted me about it, it seemed like it had Chinese characters written on it, but then I turned it on its side and saw that it was the image of the God Raven. I looked at the fellow and I realized that he saw me entirely and completely, my whole search for the meaning of these stories, and the pathways they symbolize. In the last two years I have had this experience myself many times, of seeing others completely, what lies in their hearts, what healing they seek, but I have not had someone see me in this way. I know I have had at times the limited ability to do good medicine with some others but not had it done to me in quite the same way. But then I realized that someone who can draw a pouch with the image of Raven on it out of nowhere has a strange power that comes from openness of heart and strength of mind.

In the lodge Buffalo Heart's brother sat as the singer with an eagle feather to balance the energies of the lodge. They both were incredibly funny. The first song they sang was ridiculous, drawn from an American cartoon series called "Sponge Bob". They said it was for the little kids who where there. I had no idea what they meant because there weren't any little kids in the lodge. I think he wanted to see who was sincere. Others songs were in Native American language and were subtle and strangely familiar sounding.

Each lodge was different from the last. In one he asked each person to sing a song, but interrupted the process before the entire group had finished. He seemed to know who needed to sing, who needed to pray, who needed what. A Ukrainian woman sang a haunting song in Russian.

The lodge was absolutely pitch black except for the glowing red stones which were tossed in one at a time, once all the initiates were seated around the fire pit. In one of the lodges there was barely enough room to sit upright and cross legged, in another there was enough space to lie on my back on the cool earth.

They counseled to let the heat come into the body, the same way one should let in the tobacco.

Despite the intense heat, I never felt I would need to leave early. Nevertheless people did, and he graciously let them exit, but asked they not do it in the middle of a song. They had two fire keepers working with them, both students of the ritual, and I watched for hours as he instructed them.

"You're the fire keeper. Keeping the fires clean and secure is your sacred duty. You are the one who welcomes everyone to the lodge. Keep them walking clockwise around the altar. Don't let them break the sacred line of power between the fire and the lodge. Hold the tobacco like this, two feet away. Hold the sage like this. You are the one doing the most work. You are the one learning the most and teaching the most."

One of his fire keepers helping him was this very confused looking fellow with long black hair and a huge belly who seemed like life had offered him a rebuttal at every turn, and that helping Buffalo Heart seemed the only way to make sense of what was and what wasn't and what he was for.

The other fellow was just as confused. He was a skinny guy who had decided to walk around naked, constantly and was smeared with dirt. These two were really at the beginning, of learning. I could tell their lives had brought them to this point, failures and setbacks, sadness and pain, hurt. They truly were miserable looking. You could read their hearts. He had selected two people who were at the end of their ropes, at the end of life, at the end of the possibilities that could be generated from within. They had reached out and Buffalo Heart and his brother were there to teach them. Why not try this?

There was a sincerity in the helper's work which impressed me as much as Buffalo Heart's subtle wisdom. This is what the Zen men call 'Beginner's Mind'. They both were extremely dedicated, and displayed complete concentration. Rock after rock they moved from the fire to the lodge and back, kneeling on the hard earth returning the glowing red stones through the door of the lodge, and back again, to bring the heat.

The long dark-haired helper sang very beautifully in the lodge, and Buffalo Heart remarked so afterward. He said, "Brother you sang and made me very happy", and made him some tobacco to smoke. The man's eyes moistened and turned red. Buffalo Heart seemed to have this ability to reach into the sacred fire within a person, and draw out the log that's making all the noise.

Buffalo Heart referred to things as "Good Medicine". He talked about the songs. He told me things about Rainbow and Raven that I wish I remembered better. My heart remembers them, but my head doesn't. Why is learning the way so hard? He talked about the sacred people on the mountain, that are there for us, and the Sacred Mother deep in the earth. He knew I was interested in his mythology and felt it, so he told it to me. It was as simple as that. I smoked tobacco, and the white light went into my head, and blew out and into my whole being like a giant cloud, and I told him what was happening to me.

Most of all he was this very normal very sane person. Between sweats he and his two helpers sat on beat up patio chairs in a lean to, like two mechanics chatting about whether to go back to work on a beat up old car. There was something incredibly sane and normal about it all.

No shortcuts were taken. Twenty people could be in a lodge waiting to sing and sweat, and Buffalo Heart would be quietly praying by his altar which consisted of his beads, his eyeglasses, some sacred pouches and stones, set on a small patch of earth that had some grass and moss growing out of it, right in front of the entrance to the lodge. He would be doing this and no one would be watching except for a few bemused tourist types, and meanwhile everyone inside the lodge, if they listened, would hear only a few noises that sounded like chants or grunts.

He did the work that made sense.

Dangers and Benefits of Blogging . . . and Life.

"Baby I've heard you scream it
 Maybe you said you dreamed it,
 But certainly I know you streamed it!"

I assembled massive files filled with ramblings, dreams, essays, observations, stowed all if it in an enormous trunk, notebooks that show a tattered chronology because I never can lay my hands on the one I want. There are typescripts from the days of inked ribbons, journals pounded out on erasable typewriter paper, crumbling to dust.

Google stands to reel in the creative work of all the people on the planet, simply because they have the biggest server around.

Does this mean that Google data, with cross connections, lists and links, with books and blogs, and thoughts, comments on notes and paintings, and comments on comments, and testosterone driven hits, does this mean, that ultimately, maybe even very soon, someone will put this massive pile of data to nefarious use? Even to the worst possible use?

Perhaps even delete all of it, in a flash?

Will some dud Minuteman missile leaving a silo in one of the Dakotas blow up and with an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to magnetize bit of steel in a thousand mile radius, also obliterate all silicon-stored information in less than a microsecond?

Silicon death.

Imagine a tool, it can be built, if a tool can be built it will be used. And if it can be used for good it will be used for good. And if it can be used for bad . . . it shall be . . . because the simple computation power of the universe allows it to be . . . all permutations, all possibilities, all hopes, wishes, granted, or dashed to bits, everything, that you can conceive of happening . . . will happen.

Yet somehow this magnificent dance of light and dark stays oriented . . . towards light.

For now.

If on one hand you are able to conceive of someone like Dick Cheney and his temporarily ousted clan staging another 9/11 in order to frighten the public into passing a newer, harsher amendment to the Patriot Act, then they will.

If you can conceive of Facebook eventually relinquishing their files to the Department of Homeland Security so that friends of friends can be taken away, made to disappear, get made into Soylent Green, or fertilizer, because they can't pay their credit card bills, then they will.

Everything humans make possible they also make certain. That's the fine print of existence. Our possibility becomes our reality.

We live united in an embrace at the edge of light and the edge of darkness simultaneously . . . at all times. Life prospers in this zone of no decision.

Whatever you conceive of is, a certainty, either past, currently happening, or future. So why fight it? The light of your thoughts makes it happen. Whether Facebook uses all of this data for positive or negative matters not. The point is how do you use it? How do I use it?

I use it as a box to hold all those old notebooks.

So giant SERVER of HUMANITY, hidden and guarded, backed real time, pampered, updated, translated, a crescendo of leptons through copper and silicon, hermetic amidst ferrous iron, holder of our private lives . . . I do not merely ENTRUST you with my secrets . . . or my thoughts . . . rather I BURDEN you with them . . . . since you have made it your BUSINESS to be burdened . . . . . for now, this seems a fair trade. I store all this stuff on the left and middle . . . . and glance at the ads on the right.

Left wing to the left, Right wing to the right, here I am flying from the Center. If this results in me and a ton of my co-minded friends being herded into stadiums and butchered in years to come simply because mankind does this from time to time and in the most efficient way . . . so be it. We cannot escape tyranny except through our own actions while we are alive.

So to all of you Google and Apple leftists that voted for Obama the way I did, to you who run these pages and write these applets, do you dare think that these things could not happen . . . . because of Facebook? If so then you are wrong. We all play into the hands of greatness and tyranny both. It is impossible to take your tea and my tea and separate them in such a vast ocean of cause.

Wherever, and whenever a mass media became available, it was historically used . . . and then subsequently abused. Not through any fault of yours . . . no. . . simply because it COULD BE.

Where possibility exists, lurks a certainty more real than history itself.

History doesn't dodge bullets. It makes them.

When steel technology and the internal combustion engine allowed a machine gun to be mounted inside an armored car, the first tank was born, and very shortly thereafter it ripped apart a generation of soldiers on the fields of Europe in broad daylight. And at night when newly invented mustard gas settled into their trenches where the same flower of youth slept, did they realize that this was the flip side of the same chemistry that invented aspirin?

So why, Mr. Facebook, Mr. Dell, Mr. Google, why do I entrust you with my thoughts, knowing what I know, and what you count as my beliefs?

Because dear Computer Earth, despite the abuses that will eventually happen to this and all information, you, for the short term, represent a significant and positive shift in the psychic makeup of the individual and society at large

Here on these pages we wear our most inner, most personal and most private details more publicly than if we were to sit cheek to jowl on a bench at a nudist camp.

If I spot you on a bus I know only what I can deduce from your clothes, appearance and what you carry, but if I friend you here, I gradually learn your tastes, your politics, your mind, your loves, your hates, your tastes, your weaknesses, your strengths.

What a change that represents!

My friends here, to those of you whom I've never met, and to those of you I know well, you now know more about me than my classmates at school, or kids who played with me in our sandbox at home.

The Internet has turned the most public epidermis of each of us into the folds of something private, and the private into something public for all to see. As cells in a giant organism. . . we are now welded at the outer cell wall into a whole, we each get our feed from the same arteries that nourish all of us. . .and dump our waste into the same conduits of effluvium.

Thirty years ago, we drove past farms and if we were lucky, spotted the farmer behind his tractor. But chances were we didn't, and were content to know the farmer by the rows of his planted corn, or the way his equipment gleamed, or rusted in his yard.

Today you can know that farmer intimately, and never meet him in person.

We're cells of a giant live being. Call it Earth, call it planet, call it whatever you want. It's one organism. It's now alive and has a nervous system. This is it.

Private life is our discarded skin from collective coils of writhing, turned inside out.

Holding onto my written journals condemns them to certain death. . . much as I love my kids I know not to burden them with all my crap . . . so here Computer Earth . . . it's yours . . . read it . . . or dump it as you like . . . and if you deem me a threat to National Security that will be better for me because then my musings will be considered classified and shall be kept forever!!!

That would be hitting the jackpot. Perhaps they might simply amuse you. If you have the time to peruse them, the degree of your amusement will magically protect them from erasure, as will anything that attracts your eyeballs to the right side of the screen.

But THE most probable and eventual outcome, is that this great server of mankind to which I’m contributing explodes exponentially into a crystalline quantum silicon engine of light, maintaining it's fractal memory in pulses of listless ever-emanating galactic radiant power, processed and channeled by the man-purified quartz crystal skull of Planet Earth, a computer of titanic scale, knowing everything and holding it in radiant throb of listless, ever-moving and photonic light, until it gives all it knows to the All with an explosion that can be seen across the universe.

Humans! We thought we were masters of the elements. But are we just here to purify silicon? To remove and burn Carbon? To sequester metals above the planet surface?

Join me here. . . bare all. . . . turn yourself inside out. . . be part of Vishnu's awakening and shed your skin . . . segment by segment . . . into the glistening mucus of midday . . . let the sun shine in.

Clothes that don't Fit, Categories that Break Down

New Haven has been abuzz with parties honoring the very late Mr. Charles Darwin. Everyone's been getting dressed up and having drinks at the British Art Center where they exhibited fanciful images of birds, flowers, and creatures from the beyond . .

There was the do at Mr. and Mrs. Prum's (both are ornithologists). Everyone's celebrating Darwin, but who is Darwin to us now? An extremely sensitive observer of nature, who bequeathed a vocabulary to use and wear out, to wear as part of our 'finery', no differently than a bird wears its feathers.

The clothes have to 'fit the occasion' . . . survival of the fittest.. . . ? What nonsense am I talking here?

I recoil . . . a bolt of anger passed through me when I heard the quip about the Ivory Billed Woodpecker. We stand around in heated buildings discussing the reputation of a scientist built upon a single recording of supposedly of a single extinct bird when all of Darwin's teaching seems to be saying that there's no wrong in making another species extinct, after all, it's survival of the 'fittest'.

Wait a second. That's not what Darwin taught at all. Darwin, like Leonardo, simply struggled to make sense of his observations. He made his theories servants to his facts. Social Manifest Destiny in turn made us servants to his theories. This cycle of observation/theory seems to repeat itself indefinitely. We observe. . we then theorize . . and if the body of theory fits, we enslave ourselves to the theory . . instead of continuing to observe.

That post-doc was paid for by mass extinction. Well in some ways it was.

 . . . it all has to do with language . . labels . . categories . . .

"Newton was wrong" I remember Ed North my physics professor crowing to his lot of kids. "He was right," North clarified, "Only so long as velocities remain below the speed of light."

I imagine the same scene today . . . "Einstein was wrong!" . . . or . . . given the frame of reference of large gravitational fields . . . large energies and masses, his formulas are provable . . but go searching for an individual electron? You need quantum theory . . . Einstein's suddenly no good.

"God doesn't play dice" Einstein was famous for saying. Turns out that God does throw dice. In fact '(I'll allow the personification) He has quite a number of games that He can play at any moment.

I remember a discussion with my father in the car when I was about three years old.

We were making the long (in those days it took nearly four hours) drive back to CT from New York City. It was Saturday and we'd spent the morning and afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum. My father used to leave me to wander in the European painting section, or in Ancient art, where I used to look for hours at the paintings and glass cases filled with Greek pottery. He'd be in the slides and photos department, borrowing images for the art history course that he taught.

He commented that I was growing and that I needed new clothes.

"My clothes fit me" I said.

"Well they are starting to not fit" he replied. I wondered how something like a pair of pants could both fit and not fit at the same time.

"What does that mean?" I asked him. "I'm wearing them."

He started to think I was being obtuse. "We have to take you in to get you some new trousers. You're growing taller."

"If I'm growing out of my clothes and my clothes don't fit, what do I wear to the store while we go and get new ones?" I asked him.

"You'll wear the clothes you're wearing now" he said.

"But they don't fit me!" I protested.

He gave up. We turned our minds to the problem what to do with our last quarter. Buy gas, buy one Coke and very little gas, or buy two Cokes and have a nickel left over to put in the tank. A quarter bought a lot in those days!

I wasn't nervous about being naked, after all I'd spent the morning looking at naked men and women on the sides of pots. I was more curious about the absoluteness of 'clothes that fit' or 'clothes that don't fit'. It seemed that if a wise man like my father could say my clothes didn't fit me, I shouldn't be able to get into them at all.

So I was introduced to the idea of a category, and how they inevitably break down. Ever since that conversation, I've felt queasy about labels, or seeing the world in sort-able piles, this or that, a species or a related species, a proton or an electron. Classifications seem to carry an inherent unease, a built in self-knowledge that they are either partly or wholly outdated, like leaves that are brown, but haven't fallen.

Are we looking for definitions? If we are then I have to say that as far as I'm concerned Newton was wrong, Einstein was wrong, Heisenberg was wrong, and so most of all was Darwin.

A theory can only propose limitations to itself that are known. A theory can postulate it's own limitations, but cannot formulate them, since the needed observations are lacking. So when Newton proposed energy equals one half mass times velocity squared he could not have known the exceptions. At that time there weren't any! Newton's 'rightness' was only excepted once other discoveries had taken place. As an observer Newton was brilliant . .. so also Galileo, so Leonardo. . . who touchingly labels a spot in the center of a dissected skull and writes . . . "The soul of Man resides here."

I'm amazed at the resilience of theorists who believe in the search for a foundation theory, one that covers all cases, all future data sets. Hasn't enough theory been proven wrong to prove the wrongness of all theory? That theory as we know it. . . is really only a descent from observation. Or rather . . 'what I know to be true unless I learn differently.'

Perhaps what science, economics and behavior scientists should be working on is a notion of theoretical permanence, or, a theory that helps us try to calculate how much longer a particular mind set will last. When will the hummingbird make it's turn? How long will the car move down the road? How much longer might we rely on economic theory to run our society?

Let's take a page from our friend Darwin:

There are notions that descend from Darwin which we all grew up upon . . . One of them is the ideas of species distinction and two species not being able to produce fertile offspring.

Wrong. There are a ton of exceptions to this now.

From Darwin we came up with the idea that Man was the superior species . . even while the clock of evolution and of time ticked equally for every species on earth . . . so how could one species be called 'more highly evolved' than another?

The cries of "Wrong" are now starting to sound like buzzers on a game show. No disrespect . . . Darwin had a subtle mind that enabled us to discover much. . . as much about the natural sciences as anyone. But to take the categories that he offered us as creed . . therein must lie the problem. .

To take the Categories as Creed .. . .

The Scientist is an observer who forms a theory. . . as a convenience . . to test his knowledge . to see if there's an order to his observations. He dies and his observations die with him. . but his theories . . they last. So the Master's students form a Church to teach the Master's theories and to guarantee each of the students an income for the rest of their lives.

How is the Christian Church different from a Kung Fu dojo? The master of Kung Fu dies. . the students each interpret the master's teachings differently. . they go off form their own schools. . and preach the master's theory. . .according to them. . and all hell breaks loose when the different schools get together.

So if a Church hands you a category called Christ do you believe it simply because it was called such . . and because there are Gospels to back it up? I never knew Jesus Christ, but wish I had. To me he was a Leonardo. . . a Darwin . . . a teacher . . an observer.

Is it possible to move forward past Christ, past Allah, past Yahweh, past Buddha? Is it possible to abandon the either/or categories they offer us and yet retain the essence of their teachings?

Thomas Jefferson was so frustrated with Christianity as a cult that he took a copy of the King James bible and edited it, removed all miracles and unbelievable events, leaving only Jesus's teachings. Jefferson recognized Christ for what he was, a man, and a great teacher, of the sort of greatness that only comes only every few thousand years.

They gave us shoes that fit the growing mind of man. . . for a while. The notion of species served us while we made other explorations. We are starting to see that all DNA is fungible . . movable . . it's information, and every interaction, between species offers an opportunity for duplication, for copying of code, even between humans and other mammals. . reptiles . perhaps even plants, certainly viruses and with viruses as vectors . . are swapped . . traded . . . yes like baseball cards.

Take a virus to make you resistant to a bacteria . . .splice in a gene from a plant to make your skin cells produce carbohydrates with the sun's energy . . . all this is possible . . .

More deadly than the demise of a once watertight category, such as the four elements of the Greeks [fire air earth and water] is the death of the belief system that once went with it. Yesterday it was a totalitarian interpretation of an ideal Communism that failed. Today it is Western Capitalism. No amount of bank aid or banker rip-offs can save the patient. No one believes in it anymore.


Yet what were Communism/Socialism and Capitalism but vectors in a physics that produced a variety of nation states, according to a similar mathematics of economy. It's the underlying math that's dead. The rules of both, which were the same, no longer apply. Those rules were in essence the governing rules of a fractal plane where ownership, and means of production were the vectors. Marx defined Capitalism and Communism both, but his laws have broken down. His rules are as hollow as the rotten stump that once was the God Odin.

Observe any system closely enough and it appears to be moving in a stable fashion, the whirling orbit of a planet . . or the gentle ride of a vehicle down the road or the incremental progress of a hummingbird into a flower full of nectar.

But wait. . and sometimes one has to wait a very long time . . . what was suddenly stable breaks apart, flies open, explodes, implodes, disintegrates . . changes radically. The planet's orbit disintegrates rapidly and sends it spinning into it's mother star, the vehicle suddenly makes a hard right turn . . or stops, the hummingbird is gone in a flash, leaving behind a flower slowly swaying in the breeze.

So then let's postulate . .. things appear stable and it is during this stability, and because of it that we make our labels, our categories. . . to name them and study them. But suddenly they break. Those very same containers suddenly crack, they don't hold their contents anymore . . . just as the relic of a god in the Jungle holds only a porous notion of past God . . . now is only home to bees and snakes.

Now let's examine the moment at which things collided or broke apart. . . slow the clock down. . examine closely the progress of it. Let us take for example the seemingly slow, or rapid, (depending who you are) collision of the landmass of India into the continent of Asia. This was how the Himalayas were formed.

It might seem catastrophic. . . quick . .. instantaneous even by some time scales. . .but slow the movement down even more it becomes a ballet of mountainous uprising. . . tantalizing as a dance. . . a dance that began 50 Million Years ago . . . and it is still happening.

In other words the cataclysm itself has a certain stability to it . . . a set of repeatable elements that make the future predictable (we know the Himalayas will rise significantly more from the collision of the Indian subcontinent.)

India was at one point a 'continent', a landmass . . until the collision . . at which point the categories of 'India' and 'Asia' are temporarily blurred. Like the clothes on a child who has grown out of them. If he has grown out of them why is he wearing them . . .they shouldn't fit at all.

Clothes and continents are not binary chips, delivering either a one or a zero, a fit or a not fit. . . Clothes and continents have a different 'physics' than the photon or electron, or binary numeral.

If we expand or contract the perimeters of a category. . . at what point do it's laws, it's rules . . . break down? As categories evolve and dissolve into and from each other, isn't it logical to expect the laws that go with them to change also? Doesn't the continuum of change also change the underpinning rules and principles? The rules of physics themselves.. . even the laws of math that underlie the physics . . it all changes.

This is the wonderful thing about fractals. They can help you take a category and expand it to the point that it breaks through it's own container . . into another definition, another category, just as the fruit of a mushroom pokes it's head into another medium, air, and releases it's spores. The life of the fungus has moved into the air. . . where all the rules are different. The first fish moved onto land and discovered the effects of gravity. . . The fungal spores drift through a world of light, and air. . . This is the notion of rebirth, seen on a cosmic scale it becomes a rebirth of Vishnu . . as we crawl out of our undersized snake skin sleep and venture up into a new Age . . . foreign and alien at first. Nothing we used to know and treasure is useful except for an ability to spot order in that older realm, the ability to formulate a specific set of data, experiences, or referential point of view appropriate for that time . .. that space.

And, as one would expect. . the laws of physics are different in that place.

Categories break down. Count on it.

Nettles on the Way to St. Peter

The engine roared as we passed an auto parts depots outside of town - our car felt like a roadster -  I hoped it didn't burn too much gas.

The vehicle was a prepaid. The rental company gave us a silver hearse with sun-shaded windows, a retro design. Phlegmatic burps issued from the muffler. Our trigger fingers itched as we passed banks. We were mobsters on the lam.

Passed food marts. Not hungry. Deer browse constantly but most primates take a break from eating.

The soul borrows a body, which borrows from the rest of life. Is history the record of souls that flee from a reckoning? Banks here are on the lam too, unkempt signs, branches boarded up. How temporary it all seems, malls, Fairfield Inns, Marriots, Arby's, MacDonalds - built to last a few years. Soon they'll be piles of scrap metal. Gangs will fight over their metal remains,

We passed funeral homes and cemeteries - no stops. Life's trails are marked at beginning and end.

We passed farmers pulling trailers with their pickups . . . No one could see us inside - wary of a rented car, they moved over to the right.

Strip malls gave way to grain elevators, railroad tracks, corn fields . . . fallow meadows, groves of oaks and conifers clustered around old farmhouses. Each of the farms had gathered a small bit of forest, and seemed to be clutching the trees tightly to keep warm in the howling Western winter.

We made St. Peter in less than an hour.

Arjun noticed a sign. "Pull over. Native tall grass prairie!"

Sure enough. The county historical society had acquired a bend in the Minnesota river. They built a museum to house artifacts of prairie life. A university had excavated the area a few years back, and some old shards were on display. The place was closed, but we took in what we could through the plate glass.

Trails led towards the river.

The place was called "Traverse des Sioux" or, "Where the Sioux Cross". Here the Minnesota River became shallow and it was possible to make it from one side to the other, walking, or swimming.

In 1851 the Dakota Sioux reached a decision to sell Minnesota Territory to the white man. The historical society framed the event like a bailout. The bankrupt Sioux had not been able to survive or feed themselves and so capitulated to more powerful economic interests. They wrote it up like a wise business decision. According to this version of history, there had been much celebrating on the day the treaty was inked. There was even a wedding.

It hurt to read this. It hurt as much as looking up at two huge cottonwoods, with magnificent trunks, the bark peeling in arm-thick slabs, like a hickory, enough to run up with your hands. The trunks were massive, but the upper limbs were dead, or dying despite the attentions of years of tree surgeons. The primary cause was soil erosion at the bank. The cottonwood is ideally selected by nature to hold back soil, more effective than any system of levees, or machinations by an Army Corps of Engineers. Cottonwoods and other water loving trees once contained the banks of the entire Mississippi drainage during flood. They are now defeated. Their numbers are cut to nothing. Root loss means soil loss.

I once wrote a poem for a Sioux woman who I met online. She lived in South Dakota. Her name was Sioux Lily. I was practicing a type of poem called a lipogram. It was written by constraining the alphabet to just the letters of her name. That meant writing her a poem with just the letters S, I, O, U, Y, L, X. The idea was to use Sioux Lily's name as a kind of muse, and the alphabet that spelled that name as the myths that I could use to deconstruct forces in her life.

During this period I wrote many poems for people I'd never met. They were mostly poems for women, but I also wrote poems for couples, a baby, another for the giant food chain MacDonalds. Here is the poem to Sioux Lily:

     Sioux Lilly's solo is S, I, O, U, Y, L, X
     Sioux Lilly’s soul is ill . . .
     Sioux Lilly's loss is silly
     Sioux Lilly's IOU is six
     Sioux Lilly's ill is loss of soil . . .
     Sioux Lilly's ill is . . . oil.

I read Sioux Lilly's poem to her over the telephone. She lived in South Dakota somewhere, and was involved in politics. She was a powerful heavy woman, the kind that defeats the menfolk in elections. She was a force. She said it told the story of her life.

But the poem did not do any such thing. Instead her life was built upon the letters of her name, and those letters are each individually, a myth, with powerful histories and stories behind them. Sioux Lilly had created her own name. In it she put the whole plight of her people. The poem is hers.

Soil loss means flash floods. Flash floods means New Orleans under water, destroyed agriculture, destroyed forests. Destruction that will take a dozen ice-ages to rebuild. An area with countless millions of cottonwoods, broader at the base than the largest wagon wheels, now a memory of wood ash, washed to Mexico gulf.

Arjun ran up the bark laden trunk.

Arjun is my son. All his life he has loved the forest, plants, birds. Nature in all it's forms. He's the only soul I know who at such a young age is content in the woods alone for five days. With Arjun it's easy to go hungry. He fasts constantly, by inclination. We named him Arjun after the famous Indian archer of the Mahabharata, then years later I realized, after writing his poem with just the letters in his full name, Arjun Brandreth Potter, in part why his own mythology was deeply involved with plants, birds, and trees. Here's a bit of it:

     Hear an ode on paper to Arjun Brandreth Potter
     Or be Dante here to tone a rap.
     Or Auden to pen a Bornean pantun
     . . . or a Borat to rune a rondeau
     A troubadour pater’ penned an epode tune
     To a Bhudda hunter, Arjun.
     A, J, B, D, E, H, N, P, R, T, U and O.

The words are Arjun's and only his. Somehow we live our names, if not becoming the words that our names contain, resisting them, and so becoming them anyway.

Further into the scrub forest we found another giant cottonwood, but this one was dead outright, trunk bleached bone white, the ghost of an enormous bison.

Its progeny were attempting to prosper, but the conditions just weren't right. Nature has a law, and that law is the law of succession. On destroyed land, first the pioneer species make a hasty ground cover, then scrub forest quickly take their place, a mix of grasses and trees, from there a long succession of species until the final occupants put down permanent roots. In the mountains of the Northeast the final acts were giant oaks and white pines. Here at the prairie river basins it was Cottonwood. In the groves of Illinois and Indiana, the American walnut was so prolific that wagon trains rode for days in the shade of giants, their hoops crushing the shells of walnuts. That great tree was later exterminated to supply gunstocks.

Oh the walnut has survived, yes. The Sioux have survived, and Homo sapiens, also, has also survived. At one point in human history man's numbers dwindled to a few thousand. But we survived.

Who is the final occupant of this Earth? Man? Will there ever be a final occupant?

And yet here, there is still green. Short trees are making it back. Birds sing. Chlorophyll thrives. We miss the mature trees but the world is still nature. We are nature, but are we mature? In numbers yes. Who is the top species on Earth, the plants, or us? Our myths claim we are, but we need it to be the plants.

Nature hasn't thought up much else that can feed us.

A sign explained that this land had been allowed to 'revert' to native flora and fauna. A difficult assignment. This part of Minnesota where the river weaves north, then south, then north again, like a sunning snake on the broad edge of the northern plains, prairie fingers penetrated the vast stands of mixed forest, creating a rich edge effect which fed vast populations of deer, wood bison, and bear.

Today the area bordering the river was a transition zone of scrub trees, a poor ground cover of nettles, and pioneer species like poison ivy, Virginia creeper, blackberries and raspberries. This was nature's bandage to damaged land. Where poison ivy boils and nettles sting, where blackberries scratch, the earth cries out "I'm hurt, leave me be. Let me grow back".

I thought of the colonial cry "Don't Tread on Me".

Further west the tall-grass prairie would have begun suddenly. The blue-stemmed grass was once so tall that it swished pollen against the chin. A heritage layer of rich soil piled thirty feet thick in places, and thick grass was so prolific that one felt the rise in the soil level as one stepped up to the prairie space. It seemed limitless, endless. . one could never imagine any of it washing away. All one could see were dizzying waves of grain before one's eyes.

Incredibly when colonists first arrived they didn't believe crops could grow where trees wouldn't, so they cut and cleared the forests at the edges of the rivers instead.

We saw a red-winged blackbird. Out here they don't have much of the bar of yellow that they have east. . . but the red patch is so big. A robin flew down the soft path ahead of us, alighted on the dirt, hopped, turned its head, and with a deft bob, extracted a worm. It did this three times, then carried a worm back into the cover of trees, to it's nest.

"The robins listen for worms." Arjun explained. "People think they are looking with their eyes, but they're not. They're listening."

These robins had mastered an art, staying ahead of the occasional tourist on the path, and catching the worms before they dove for safety in the dirt. Arjun and I were functioning as beaters, making noise and driving game into the hunter's pitch.

Then we saw a Yellow-headed Blackbird,

"Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus!" Arjun burst out. "I've never seen one."

I took a picture. It was bolder than the Red-winged . . . and larger, near the water, singing like a trooper's patrol car.

A grosbeak taunted from a tree . . . it had picked up the native accent and sounded like a robin.

Then not far from the river's edge, amidst this park that is trying to recover a lost bit of riparian forest, and prairie flora, stuck a plaque, that enigmatically described the area as "Land Seas".

The writer of this enigmatic bit of mythology went on to write how a people who had arrived after months of hard travel by train and by wagon, confused grassland with ocean. But the writer is telling the truth is he not? There's a way to read history if you want to find out what really happened. The secret is to listen to sound, not just to read words as they are spelled. Indeed it was a 'Land Seize' . . .

I thought of that book where the older Zen teacher calls his student 'grasshopper'. I imagined him saying to me "Soft ears grasshopper, soft ears. "

All of us are students, though many of us drop out. To be a student only requires listening.

If the confused and seasick colonists were in some way morally disoriented, were the policies of the U.S. Government towards the Sioux therefor forgivable? Who is being excused here? The inhabitants here have to live alongside what is left of the native Sioux population. There can't be a lot of pride in what happened. Was this pun purposeful, or subconscious? Either way it embeds a hard and bitter truth, into an overall falsification of the record. The land had been taken outright. The treaty was merely the legal flourish executed to pry the land from a defeated people, ex-facto.

I imagined this unsung writer, disguising his opinion of events that took place in 1851, amidst alliteration, He slips his word play into the public record. Tourists walking past will not get it at first, but later, in the car, they will.

The writer's a poet I thought. A grosbeak singing a robin's song.

Arjun was captivated by the nettles. "We don't have these like this in Connecticut". There were two species. Urtica dioica, stinging nettle, was smaller, with a serrated leaf like a beech, and a much larger variety, Wood Nettle, Laportea canadensis.

He rested the back of his finger against the stalk. "If it stings and my finger swells up, it's nettle." he pronounced. Sure enough within minutes his skin reddened, . . and swelled.

He tested the second variety . . . same immediate effect.


"Tom Brown says you have to get to know everything that lives around you. Learn to pick nettle so that it won't sting you. This is not impossible. You just have to know how to grab it. . . If you are afraid of nettle it will sting you. If you aren't you won't even feel the sting as you pick it."

"Why would you pick nettles? Is it a medicine?"

"Absolutely. It makes wonderful tea. The original contents of spanakopita was nettle. It's one of the most nutritious of plants. " Arjun explained how it was loaded with iron, potassium. "The colonists used to flog themselves with nettles to cure rheumatism, and relieve themselves of other chronic pain."

"Urtication means to flog with nettles."

We spoke for a few minutes about the similarity of sound. Urticate, and Hurt . . similar sound. The grosbeak spoke again, it's imitation of native robin. Land Seas and Land Seize.

They learn to speak in tongues, birds do. That's half the life of a songbird. . . singing. Birds are great masters of ritual. They sing as much because it is fun, as for any other reason. Their song evolve in patterns that bear structural similarities with Brahman rituals in India, or Catholic intonations by monks in Europe. These patterns equip the user with a flexible mind, a memory, a voice, and an ability to communicate instantly, if there is such a need. But most of the life of a songbird is not spent in fear of hawks. . . so it sings sweetly . . .

I looked in awe at the broad green leaves of Wood Nettle . . . taller, darker, like rich spinach. We could soak them in the mud of the Minnesota right now. . and the poisons would be neutralized. . . a more nourishing salad one would never eat.

Yet from where we stood we could see trucks bolting along the highway. Three in a row bore the logo "Green Giant". They powered down the highway, headquarters nearby, shipping frozen spinach from everywhere to everywhere. . . . .

They left the Nettles to us.

Merida

From a flat jungle, a city of limestone rose, clustered about a pyramid. A mountain, it towered above the Mayan world, their people, their highways, temples, their scorpions, jaguars, and precious water in deep springs. Into sacred cenotes the Maya threw votive statues of gold, and bones of souls sacrificed to Quetzalcoatl, their god.

Sacrifices became so prevalent that throwing bones into the sources of drinking water was deemed unwise. Skulls were later stacked in another place, at the Temple decorated with a thousand carvings, . . . of skulls.

-:-

The quetzal, a jungle bird with long tail feathers still lives in these parts.

Quetzalcoatl half bird half-serpent, in divine manifestations had a manly aspect, and and during the late Maya, was as demanding of blood as the God of Hummingbirds, to whom the Aztecs built temples in Central Mexico.

“When He rises in the morning He is pale, and demands blood, and at night He goes to sleep gorged on the sang of his victims.”

-:-

Adjacent to the pyramid the ball court, two parallel stone walls fifty yards apart, reflect every whisper. A yoke of stone surmounts the center of each wall. Adorned in feathers and wearing protective armament, the players of the violent sport, something of a combination between lacrosse and soccer, competed to pitch a small rubber ball through one of the stone rings without using their hands. The teams vied with each other for victory in front of the Gods, and the winning team was sacrificed. They changed it . . . as power shifted from Gods to men . . the losing team was sacrificed.

-:-

The sun down here can be blinding. The pyramid is extremely steep, and is the only edifice of any height for hundreds of miles. You climb to the sun, creator and executioner of all life. A flint or stone axe flashes from the sky, a head severed sends a red shower of blood, radiant in the blinding light, creating a rainbow spray of colors, a refractive warm salty mist. The rainbow apparition that hovered in the air was believed to be Quetzalcoatl.

-:-

At the top of the pyramid many of the stone steps are lose, they wobble, and are very uneven, and I'm sure that many, Westerners have taken an awful roll down the entire staircase. I listened to the yells of English and German tourist women, pleading for someone to help them get up or down. Typically people start climbing the thing, and then once they are aware of how steep it is they begin climbing on all fours, and somewhere further up they freeze and flatten out like worms onto the face of the serrated pitch.

-:-

Merida is the retail mecca of the Yucatan. A downtown Macy's, hundreds of shoe stores, Mayan girls in high heels, narrow sidewalks, crowded shop lined streets. Sears is here doing a big business in washer dryers. The market is quite close. Red strong looking onions, radishes, melons, mangoes of endless variety, papayas, other sweet fruits too numerous to mention. Bananas, tomatoes, fish of every hue taken from the nearby sea. Blue-fin, tuna, shark, grouper, ray, eels. The indigena women sit on blankets with piles of chilies in front of them.

-:-

 - At the guest house, courtyard, slotted with shutters, veiled by mosquito netting, yellow pearl marble stairs curving right and left up to the second floor balcony past two hairy marble lions with curly manes, a slim Mexican proprietor pads about in plastic thongs, this sound echoes throughout the house. On the second landing I met a Danish bespectacled tall kid carrying a knapsack. Said he got laid in Zipolite on the Pacific coast, actually used the words, 'I recommend it highly.'

-:-

A couple of American girls have gotten so broke they've stayed on at this place week after week, because moving around cost money. They got lazy and slovenly in their dress, and sometimes padded about with hardly anything on. Had frequent conversations with them as they sat spread legged airing their crotchy parts not in the least caring that I saw all their secrets. Got used to this after a while.

One day they locked themselves out of their room, down a dark dingy passage along the first floor, where horses were kept in the old days. I played with the lock using a coat hanger, and one of their hairpins, with a screwdriver borrowed from the proprietor. They hung from my shoulders entreating me not to give up. My probing into the lock became an exploration of many other things, when finally the catch spring yielded and the wooden crate of a door swung open to a haven of musty sheets and clothes they bounced in and shut the door after me quite worried that the proprietor would catch them, that he was very particular about ‘what went on’.

I could do nothing else except run the tools back to their proper places.

Ravin' in Sleepy Eye

Pipestone National Monument boasts no large statues or memorials, just small quarries with carved faces looming from stratified rock. It's a magic place, where Native Americans from all over the continent still come to quarry stone to make their pipes.

My son Arjun got a job counting birds out at Pipestone for the summer. Despite a small size, the land possesses slices of rare tall grass prairie. Prairie bird migration was the thesis subject of Arjun's boss, Sarah Rehme, a quiet Midwestern woman in her mid twenties. She's a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, creating a census of songbird populations at three Western parks, to see if there's anything that can be done to reverse their decline.

Sarah hired three teams of youngsters to make counts at three locations. She'll spend her summer in her white pickup driving between them, training and supervising. Part of the work involves setting mist nets. Birds are caught, studied, and released. Blood is collected, isotopes can reveal where the birds have been and what they've eaten. Sarah also created a system of 'data points' throughout the park, where she and Arjun are to watch and count birds. These data points were fed into GPS linked maps. Each bird sighting became a little red pin on a Google map.

As Sarah was impatient to get her team in gear, I collected my son at the end of his spring term from College of the Atlantic in Maine, on a Friday. By Sunday night we were in Eden Prairie, a suburb west of Minneapolis.

Eden Prairie, so named by early settlers because of its rich soils, and beautiful terrain, was made wealthy in the 1990's by info-tech companies. Beneath the clutter of man's architecture, the earth still is beautiful.

Grass flows from this place. You sense the rise in the earth where the prairie is and feel the memory of forests around it. Prairie Center Road circles the original grassland. Instead of wagons, imagine K-Marts, boutiques, Marriot hotels, and Chinese restaurants. Eden Prairie today is a big mall, filled with cars and shoppers.

In the old book, Eve was Judaism's first attempt at a Goddess. The Bible took her on with reluctance. She is after all guilty of spoiling a pretty good deal. Mary the mother of Christ, and Mary Magdalene, depending on your beliefs, have some attributes of the original Eve. As Goddess she was a provider. and at Eden Prairie one sensed the power of Eve, and the power of her Earth.

Eve gave life. Crops, game, water, minerals, lumber, forests, birds to look at, birds to eat. The land was poetry. This itself spelled danger. I explained it to Arjun, "Not everything that nature makes is on offer." Indeed this was the abstract lesson contained with the story of Eve. Some fruits are not for Man.

The ancient Greek goddesses Hera, Athena, Demeter, and Artemis all contributed to the modern boiled-down Eve. Male gods were in the ascendancy; language and metals made it possible to sail abroad and raid other cultures for their wealth. Men ruled. Women stayed home. Zeus replaced the Muse, (same sound), and dallied with her granddaughters.

We spent the night in Mankato, and the following morning headed along straight highways past green farms, towards the little town of Sleepy Eye.

"Ish-Tak-Ha-Ba", Sleepy Eye, the Dakota chief after whom this town is named, had a lazy eye with a drooping lid.

I felt an instantaneous connection when I read about Chief Sleepy Eye because as a boy my own left eye had geen affected by a difficult birth. Our neighbor, a local Swedish dairyman whom we called Farmer Johnson, in turn nick-named me "Blinky-Eye".

Farmer Johnson was exactly the sort of man that worked the prairies of Minnesota. He labored hard, lived long, said little. As a boy he lost his whole family in a barn-fire. The father went in, the mother after him, then his only brother, then the barn collapsed.

"That same day I milked the cows," Farmer told me. He was a teenage boy, alone without any family in rural America.

Sleepy Eye town recently received a huge share of media attention. A thirteen year-old native Sioux with a cancerous tumor in his chest, had refused court ordered chemotherapy and fled with his mother. The police looked everywhere for the couple, but they'd split, and headed to Mexico. The mom was in favor of traditional medicine.

But then for some reason, they decided to come back.

Arjun and I stopped for coffee at Dan's Bakery. Pickup trucks were parked outside. Sleepy Eye is one of those places that must have had incredible wealth during the bread basket days. The buildings along the main street are brick-faced and simple, but the mansions just outside of town are palatial.

At Dan's they still make the donuts in house. Old men sit about with baseball caps covering bald spots, drinking so-so coffee at a dollar a cup. The donuts make up for the coffee. Fifty cents apiece.

The waitress was an slim woman with black fillings around her front teeth. She was a heavy smoker. I pitched her a question about recent media attention, and asked if news reporters had been in buying coffee.

She sidled up and lowered her voice.

"I'm not one to gossip," she said. "But if you really want to know, I'll tell ya," and grabbed a chair.

"The boy is a real sweetie. The mother's nice too! Don't get me wrong."

She made comfy for a long chat.

"I mean . . . I don't share her religion. She found some native healer. It breaks your heart when you think about it. The whole state was out last night trying to hunt them down. Cops all over. They gave up and came back. The poor kid is probably going onto the drip today. We're all praying he makes it."

Arjun and I had a look around. There were old baking tins and flour containers and old hand-cranked egg beaters, There was a map on the wall. It showed the place where the defeated Dakota Sioux were detained after the 1862 uprising. A circle of tents, each tent numbered, barbed wire, sentry posts. In 1862 Sleepy Eye was a prison camp.

Our waitress called it a 'Historic Map of the Sleepy Eye". I wondered if she knew what it depicted.

We drank up. We had a deadline to meet in Pipestone so we headed on.

The drive was uneventful, except for a cloudburst outside of Florence. We missed our turn, and were about to enter South Dakota when we wheeled back.

Out of the mist loomed a horizon of towers that spun in the wind. A wind farm, just north of Pipestone sprouted approximately 800 three-bladed wind generators with 275 foot diameter turbines that spun on the horizon. The sheer size of the project made one dizzy.

We were early so we went on to look at Sioux Falls, South Dakota. There was an unbroken horizon of farm equipment, rusting in the rain. And a valley of sub-prime housing, rotting, 90% vacant, a sea of homes in default, so large that it circled the horizon.

Then on the way back I spotted my first bison. There stood in the rain near exit 400, off Route 90. About forty of them, looking too fenced in to ever dig up any prairie earth. I imagined hearing the roar of their hooves and feeling queasy as the landscape moved.

I stopped again at the wind farm. Watching those props turn I felt queasy. It hit the gut. The horizon was moving again. It was worse than driving next to a moving train. Not surprisingly the place was called Buffalo Ridge. The Suzlon Rotor Corp had built a huge plant outside of Pipestone, to be able to supply rotors for the new project. Suzlon is now the largest employer in the area. They make one rotor there every day.

Suzlon was an Indian company. Not Native American Indian but India Indian. They even held a Hindu puja ceremony in 2005 when they finished building the plant, which is a mammoth white metal fabrication just south of Pipestone. I drove out to look at the place. Finished rotors sat outside. They looked like over-sized white eagle feathers.

We arrived at Pipestone, and found the apartment building where Arjun would be staying. A Federal Housing project, staffed by Federal HUD officials said it was the tallest structure in town, though the wind towers to the north were a lot taller.

Eleven stories of Federally subsidized housing. Arjun got equipped with badge, signed a lease, and promised to be careful who he brought in at night.

Sarah, Arjun's boss was there, and so was Cassie, his teammate on the bird project. I remember reading that wind projects in California were dubbed "Condor Cuisinarts" by critics who found carcasses below some of the early structures. It's perhaps too easy to dismiss wind power as an alternative to foreign oil.

I decided not to stress Sarah by asking her how many of her meadowlarks met an end at the edge of the Suzlon blades. Her task was to study songbirds at the National Monument. We drove to the park, a small place, with a beautiful stream running through it, and cumbersome attempts to rejuvenate wild tall grass prairie. We smelled smoke. One of the park rangers had just completed a 'burn' of other 'invasives'.

The four of us set out to explore the park, and I snapped pictures of the three young people as they set out to try and rescue songbirds from forces so powerful it seemed hopeless. Our footsteps took us to the perimeter of Pipestone Monument within minutes. We stayed to the path. The grass seemed truly precious. At the waterfall, which cascades down through quarries of red rock, I was reminded of Longfellow's poem "Hiawatha". This was the same waterfall that had moved Longfellow.

The stream was bounded by small rock outcroppings, previously quarried by the tribes of this area centuries ago. There were enigmatic faces left in the rock. They seemed accidentally discovered in the rock, but once seen, tweaked with a hammer blow here or there, then left on purpose. Once a being show's its face, you never do anything to diminish it. Human, or animal, they respected whatever they saw, and quarried elsewhere.

Inside the National Park's building a number of Native American employees were carving Calumet peace-pipes from the red pipestone. I chatted briefly with them. I overheard one of the park officials saying "If they don't get their paperwork in on time they won't be having any Sundance."

One of the carvers was doing bead-work that day. His name was Solomon. He was Sioux, and was going to college. I asked him about the God Raven. Raven is common to all the North American tribes.

"Have you been dreaming of Raven?" he asked. "Did you get guidance from him?"

Pipestone is sacred land. Every Native American tribe has the right to mine pipestone here. The mines are tiny, ten feet by four feet, a few feet deep. No power tools are allowed. The veins of red stone extend throughout the area, and some of the wealthy businessmen in town harvest huge quantities at other locations, using all the latest power equipment.

The calumet pipes were the instruments of peace recognized by all tribes, east and west. The land was sacred. The stone was sacred. Thanks had to be given for taking the stone. Offerings had to be made.

-:-

On the return trip to Minneapolis, I stopped again at Dan's in Sleepy-Eye. An older lady was serving coffee. I avoided talk about the young boy. Instead we chatted about the selling out of small farms.

I helped myself to two more of their delicious donuts and settled in.

She began to talk. "We all had a hundred and fifty or two hundred acres. Never more than that. Now you can't survive off that. They're all selling out. Every one. South Minnesota is boarded up. I really don't know what people are going to do.

"The retirement home here's filled with beaten farmers. I went over for Reminiscences Night last Thursday. It was amazing how we used to live here. No refrigeration. We kept our milk in pails at the bottom of our wells. And we wrapped our meat in cotton cloth and buried it in our grain."

I asked if I could take a picture of the old map on the wall. "I don't see why not," she said a little nervously.

"Hey if you're interested in history, just go down that street. You won't regret it. Go until you see the church. Then go inside," she said.

I went as directed. The road crossed the tracks, and the local grain co-operative was right there, just like the one in Mankato, the bigger town nearby. The tall grain elevator was magnificent, stark, cathedral-like, a spire erected to the corn Goddess. Yet I wondered what rituals governed the transport of grain in and out of these structures.

Whose culture was this?

Is it American? What is an American?

In Mexico, where the Spanish were consistently brutal and cruel to the Central and South American natives, the Europeans interbred and had children. So the cultures hybridized, the European and Native American myths mixed. Cruelty made them one. Some parts of Mexico are much the same as they were centuries ago, some are similar to old Spain, but most are something truly unique, a fusion. You go into a church, there's Christ, there's St. John, but the saints are borrowed from Mixtec, Maya, or Aztec mythology. The local cultures lives on amidst the economy of the invading race.

The Yucatan peninsula holds a vital Mayan population. The language has changed, but lives on. The native peoples have adapted. Suffering is ubiquitous, but seems to be worse in lands where one culture fights to isolate itself from another.

North America has lived the path of segregation. We've not integrated. We inherited an Anglo-Saxon paranoia about 'peoples beyond the pale'. We've created ghettos and slums, like the ones in pre-Nazi Europe. We've fought off Natives, persecuted Black Americans. We've confined the Sioux and the Mohawks to bars, gambling casinos and reservations, and resisted mixing our culture with theirs.

What are we defending ourselves from?

On the TV at Dan's Coffee Shop a local version of the show "The Price is Right" aired without anyone listening. The glib affectations of the overfed announcer and the false glee of those that won a car, or a set of movie passes, or a backyard barbecue set, played to deaf ears. The old men chucked their cards around and took no notice. And the waitress was telling me about the old days on the prairie.

So what is Empire culture? A culture of tall buildings absolutely. Buildings that glitter. A culture of cost. High cost impresses. The more sacred, or the more powerful, the higher the elevation, and the higher the cost.

Wait, we're a culture of architecture. Why?

Cathedrals, skyscrapers. Always trying to be tall, or taller. But now our churches are only relatively tall. Every town has a cell tower. The most important buildings in a European cultured town are tall, always. The clock tower in Waterbury CT was tall, near where I grew up, modeled after towers in Sienna Italy. So were the churches. The most important buildings in New York were the twin towers, but when they came down that left the Empire State.

Height and size, that's one thing. Chicago downtown. Communication antennae. The bridge on a tour ship that dwarfs a Caribbean island. A bigger particle collider is better than small one. A bigger airplane more comfortable, a bigger car makes the trip seem smaller.

A bigger house, a bigger dining room. A bigger pension, a bigger place to shop.

Bigger is better. Do we question?

Wait . . . we're always in a hurry. We want to shorten the time for every task, and lengthen the time for every pleasure. "Get it done faster" . . "Takes no time at all" . . . "Save time" . . . "Time is money."

What is wrong with time I wondered. What is wrong with walking, as opposed to running, or taking a fast car, or a fast airplane? Does someone who rushes through life actually get more done?

Why can't we conduct our politics in the street? Why can't we worship on a mountain or in a desolate valley? Why do we seem to require a building in every instance? Judaism and Christianity had their sacred places, but then temples got built and those then became more sacred than the events that led to them.

All empires have slaves. Even in Mexico, when Mayan culture entered a final decline, and pyramids for sacrifices were built, slavery was rampant. The militaristic death throws of a dying culture brought slaves back from other lands to toil, and to be sacrificed on the pyramid steps of Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Tikal.

Is culture the precious vestige of old buildings which have lasted hundreds or thousands of years, or is it something more perishable than a feather, a poem, a story, a sense of visual structure, or memory, even a word?

A review of cemeteries and monuments in North America will reveal that what is often written on stones are often the most blatant lies in print today. Could we have a fear of the past? Are we trying to forget our ancestors by putting stones on top of them?

An American truly of this land, doesn't care about writing on a stone. He has the message written in his heart. He remembers. His ancestors are better remembered, without books, and without stones to carve on. Their stories are told, not written. He's not rushed to tell these stories, but can recite them for days.

The only quarrying that Native Americans ever did was to make stone bowls, and peace pipes. What a shame our world leaders can't come together, make some pipes, eat, and share smoke. I imagine Bush or Obama reaching into their pouches to load bowls with sacred tobacco.

I helped myself to a second cup. My waitress friend brought out a scrapbook that had belonged to her father. There were pictures of her family riding the tractor. Cows, corn, local farm fairs.

Archaic European culture has some similarities to Native America. With the invention of written language, and metals, it is possible to declare war. The men stop farming, and instead take from farmers. You conquer with the sword and make it legal with the pen. That's Empire. Europe just got to the idea first. Part of Empire means ditching the older Gods of the Earth, the Moon, and the Harvest, in favor of Gods of War and Metal, and the Sun.

An empire uses the written word to take the place of the spoken. The word is sacred, only if it is written. Writing becomes power. The book becomes more sacred than the direct experience of reality itself.

We're word worshipers. Christianity and Judaism both claim that the Word is God. By extension we've made the written word our authority. Words are written or printed on paper. And paper needs a home, to protect it. So we build libraries, and limit their access. We base our politics between the covers of recorded laws, and acts, and deeds.

Christ was supposed to have had one go at writing his thoughts, but he obscured what he wrote. He's remembered for what he said and did. In yoga, thought is considered most powerful, because thought begets speech, speech begets action. Thoughts are the headwaters of words and deeds.

But our myths claim the beginning was the written word. Life begins with one certificate and ends with another. Christ's life, a life of example, was torn away from him by a book.

So I say with confidence America was created by a culture of Empire. What we call America is but the outskirts of a fiction we're struggling to maintain. To become American, we must again realize our own humanity, instead of trying to school our children to continue Empire building. We must live like Christ or the Buddha, instead of being content to know that there are books about them.

And so with a wink to the grain elevators in Sleepy Eye, I finished my journey through Ish-Tak-Ha-Ba's town by driving the three remaining blocks to St. Mary's Catholic Church.

What a century Ish-Tak-Ha-Ba saw! He was born Sisseton (from 'Sissetowan', Sioux, a Dakota word meaning 'he who loves water') in the year 1780. He became chief of his tribe at age forty-four. In 1851, after most of his land had already been taken illegally, he negotiated a treaty that retained a ten mile strip either side of the Upper Minnesota, and deeded the rest of territory to the US Government. In 1857 he was asked to relocate his camp of remaining Sioux to the north side of Sleepy Eye Lake. In 1860 he died, probably heart broken, nine years after the treaty had been signed.

In 1894 the Sleepy Eye Flour Milling Company was in full run and according to local documents owned 27 grain elevators in Minnesota and South Dakota. It had it's own cooper's shop, and had a capacity of 5,000 barrels of flour per day. A postcard of the old mill is captioned "Two trainloads, twenty six cars each, daily."

Brands included Cream, Apple Blossom, Snowflake, Chief, and Cyclone. The mill ran constantly six days a week. Painter N.C. Wyeth illustrated the outside of Cream of Wheat cartons with his painting "Where Mail goes, Cream of Wheat Goes."

A scant year before the Wright Brothers made their first flight, the remains of Ish-Tak-Ha-Ba were relocated to downtown Sleepy Eye. Chief Red Eagle, in whose teepee Ish-Tak-Ha-Ba had died, agreed to take the town elders to the place of the old chief's burial.

According to a local document which is available online:

"Red Eagle buried Sleepy Eye in one of his own new buckskin suits, protected the body with boards which included his pipe, a small mirror, his tobacco pouch of raccoon skin, beads, and other small articles. . . . Red Eagle . . . told Fairbault to sink his spade six inches to the west and going down they hit Sleepy Eye's skull right in the middle."

A park was dedicated to the chief in the center of the new prosperous Sleepy Eye town. A fifty foot tall granite obelisk marked Sleepy Eye's final place of rest.

In January 1932 Lake Sleepy Eye went dry. Remnants of the Sisseton Sioux scattered. Water tables everywhere were declining. The country was in a drought and a great depression.

In July 1994 a eight foot tall bronze sculpture of Sleepy Eye was unveiled beneath the fifty foot tall granite monument, just beneath the four hundred foot tall grain elevators. The sculpture was modeled by a Native American Sisseton Dakota named JoAnn Bird. It was decorated with a plaque that reads:

"Ish-tak-ha-ba, Sleepy Eye, Always a Friend of the Whites. Died 1860"

Two years after Ish-tak-ha-ba's death, the remaining Sioux rebelled against the whites up and down the Minnesota River. Dakotas and settlers were killed alike. Over one thousand Dakota rebels were imprisoned in jails throughout Minnesota. Three hundred and three were sentenced to hang but President Lincoln commuted the sentences of 275. The rest swung from ropes in Mankato. .

St. Mary's did not disappoint. It's as big as many Gothic structures in Europe.

Back in Pipestone, the Native Americans still place tiny offerings wrapped in red cloth into the branches of the trees above the sacred quarries of stone.

One would not even think them a sacred places. You just have to know. The offerings, small bundles of tobacco, and herbs, are placed in red cloth. They hang from twigs, catch the breeze. Raven listens.

And so I entered Sleepy Eye Church of St. Mary's. It was patterned after Chartres Cathedral, built at huge expense, built during the bread-basket days, in the middle of the American great plains. It was built of brick that had been fired with an entire forest of trees, held together with mortar made by roasting limestone for weeks. Again, more trees.

It was a sacred place. The altar looked like a forest. The columns seemed like trunks of giant oaks.

I went inside St. Mary's and prayed to Raven. I prayed for the young boy with the tumor.

I prayed he'd grow tall and become Chief of Sleepy Eye.

Jungle Honey

I go through honey pretty quickly. I put it in tea, on toast, on pancakes. Then my brother got me twenty-one pounds of honey for Christmas.

Do you know how much honey that is? He spent a whole day looking for a glass jar with a top big enough.

I opened it up on Christmas morning, and I thought he had given me motor oil. That much honey in that big a jar looks awful dark. What is in it? I asked him.

"It's honey. It's not plain ordinary honey" he said. "This here's jungle honey. That's why it's so dark. This honey's gathered by giant bees in the jungles of South America. It comes from jungle mountains covered with profuse wet jungle blossoms. This honey's wild. This honey isn't clover honey. It's jungle honey."

I thought ah well. Honey's honey.

I had a hell of a time getting it back to New York. My arm aches when I think of the blocks I walked carrying that darn jar. I was a greedy privileged bear with his own private supply. I had so much sweetness on me I was cheating the world. What am I going to do with all this honey? I asked myself.

Well today I opened up the twenty-one pound jar and siphoned off some jungle honey into my little honey jar and ran my tongue around the edge before putting the top back on.

This was no ordinary clover. This was rhubarb root purple violet rock jungle blossom red peacock feather strutting tree of mountain gold frogs chirping "aurelius" "aurelius" and red jaw-banded brown purple snakes crawling worm-like in the dry high sky high branches of the blue-green hanging sphagnum, higher and higher where the sun shines brighter stinging like lilac rustle of wings humming and stinging and pea bark peeling and cloud moisture forming. This was banks of river water blossoms pelting carpet upwards the vertical paths of noisy jungle silence. This was the nectar of the very Amazon herself, the queen of one-breasted warrior woman had given me this through my brother and it was from between her legs and she was quivering as I slurped away in old New York spreading her on tea and toast and pancakes. This was emulsified heart wax-protecting honey. This was clitoris-mad orificial sacrifice drippings extracted from a thousand million hot South American Bleeding Heart Voodoo pussy flowers all screaming to give me their sweetness. This was green Acacia flower sap. This was dream fluid, reality poison. This was curare, jaguar spittle and fer-de-lance piss. This was black hole soil juice and Peru top melt-water combined. This was dangerous stuff.

Yet I wanted more. This was continent red-russet. This was warble-tongued shrikes shrieking 'hi-mama hi-mama' and green pussy lingers darting and screaming "Giuseppe" "Giuseppe". This was cunt-seltzer. This was cricket-scratch saw-legs spider web tangle-eating death and mystery netting macro/micro aphrodisiac-al madness bliss. This was heaven, from the Earth Goddess of all jungle slits bleeding profusely into my teacup.

[photo: John Sullivan]

White Shoes for a Cherokee Bride

I prayed for Rainbow in Buffalo Heart’s sweat lodge. He was a healer, and she needed healing. Buffalo Heart blew his flute, and I heard the shrill of it at the base of my neck. I was sure Rainbow heard it too.

Rainbow went back to Tulsa around the time her kid cousin killed herself with a heroine overdose. It had been a dark year. Rainbow called a few times and told me the Rainbow energy was just not what it used to be. “It’s all drugs and alcohol and unemployment,” she said. ”Who wants to live?” She asked me to use the company phone to conference a free call with her friend Eva in Germany, but that had not been possible, and I was feeling bad about that.

So when I returned from the weekend with Buffalo Heart, I called Rainbow’s new number. Incredibly, she answered.

“RBG this is MWP. Hey are you coming to New York?”

“Planning on it. Planning on it. Hey can you do me a favor?”

“What is it Darling?” I like calling Rainbow Darling, more importantly she likes it. She knows I love her, and that it’s up to her to direct those feelings of mine. It’s Father, with a bit of Eros thrown in. She likes the fact I’m still attracted to her.

“I need you to go to Canal Street to buy some white shoes. They’re the open ended flip flops made out of white netting with little white flowers attached to the front. I need a size eleven.”

“Size eleven, that’s enormous!”

“I told you this is the land of giants. They’re for a wedding.”

“Are they for you?”

“Are you kidding? I don’t wear an eleven, you should know that by now. They’re for the bride. I need them here in Tulsa by Friday. Can you do it?”

“I’ll try Darling. I’ll try”

I took the N train into Manhattan and got off at Canal. The weekend had set my head on fire. It felt like white light was pouring out of my forehead and neck. I wondered if I was sick. Bits of poison ivy began to break through at my ankles and wrists. The air was hot and rank and humid. It had been raining solidly for three days. Today the sun was trying to poke through but everything was wet.

I thought about Buffalo Heart’s last email. “I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

Thinking about all this gave me a headache. Clearly there was a link between events. Why was he being so difficult?

Buffalo Heart was part Cherokee by birth. Now two days later this assignment comes to go find some shoes for a Cherokee lady I don’t even know, from Rainbow, a Cherokee lady that I know well and love like my own family. The whole thing was cryptic.

I had just met Buffalo Heart over the weekend. He was running a sweat lodge at the festival in Pennsylvania. They had the lodge set up next to a beautiful piece of the river. It was cold water, that ran in pools, and on the other side were some high rocks, and hemlocks growing out of them.

Buffalo Heart grew up in Virginia, where a lot of the Cherokee had ended up after the Trail of Tears. He had Cherokee blood in him, he said, but really he was just a wild kid, from a not-so-good part of town, stealing stuff, and taxing everyone's patience. "I was in trouble, headed for worse trouble," he said.

He met a healer, an old Hopi man, who healed in various ways, one of them was by running sweat lodges.

It was the full ritual. A sacred sequence, walking around the fire, offerings made, tobacco smoked out through the pores by the steam of hot rocks thrown into the lodge. A swim in cold water between sweats. You did it four times. Inside, where it was dark, everyone sat in a circle looking at the large glowing stones tossed in by the assistant from the outside. We sang songs. Buffalo Heart and his helper sang songs themselves.

This was what he learned from the old man, indeed he was showing me now. The same sequence. The new-agers circled, listening as he blew his flute, and asked everyone to say a blessing.

The first time he sweated, the old shaman loaded a "pipe the size of a gourd, packed it with massive amounts of his most powerful tobacco, and other herbs, and lit it with a piece of burning branch from the fire, and handed to him with the command, "Inhale! Deeply!".

This he did, and apparently his heart raced like a crazed animal. Buffalo Heart said that if was anyone else they probably would have died. Buffalo Heart was a very big kid. The old guy knew what he was doing and Buffalo Heart was healed after that first sweat. He came to his senses about his own life. He came out and spent a very brief period of time learning from the old man, until, one evening at a tribal meeting, the old fellow stood up, said "This is Buffalo Heart, he's your healer now," and then dropped dead.

I think Buffalo Heart said that was the first time he ever heard his new name. Since then he's been doing sweat lodges all over the country. He practices a kind of healing that is very gentle, but very powerful, talking, observing, listening, encouraging.

I don’t look for causes. I’d been sent to listen for shoes. The river swims the fish, as much as the fish swims the river. Of course any fish with his ears on can hear a pebble thrown in the water.  I wasn’t hearing anything.

I walked Canal Street, up and down. One dealer had something like what Rainbow had described. But they were pink. This wasn’t going to be easy. I was looking for white half shoes with flowers on them. Aren’t more lady's shoes white than any other color? She’d already bought pairs for all the bridesmaids. They had to match. I had to do this by Friday. Couldn’t they just be nice white shoes? This was nuts. I was not qualified to do this task. I’ve never bought a gal shoes in my life, and now they have to match five other pairs perfectly and be there in less than thirty-six hours.

I was out of energy. I plopped down at a Chinese noodle house and ordered dumpling noodle soup. I flipped open my Blackberry and called Rainbow.

“RBG, I’m not having huge luck here. Need to get some direction.”

“I’m sure they’re there” she said. “Try the side street down from the Post Office.”

I ate the dumplings, then munched the bok-choy. There were only two other people in the place, as it was still way before lunch.

‘Imagine those shoes’ I told myself. ‘See them and they will exist.’

They could be anything, molded plastic, uni-body construction, sewn, stapled. What about the heels? Rainbow said nothing about the heels. She’d said they were made of netting? What kind of netting? Who makes shoes of netting?

The Chinese might. I poured in the dumpling sauce, then ate the noodles and last of all drank the liquid.

Buffalo Heart told me about his past learning from the old man, while he mixed me a big smoke. He laid rows of tobacco, and other herbs on top of each other. The first pile, about two inches wide and six inches long, was tobacco, then more tobaccos, then bearberry, and after that coltsfoot,  mugwort. The result was a small pyramid of plants of different colors - this helped him get the proportions right - it was also beautiful to watch.

"How many herbs do you mix in?"

"Depends what I feel like, what time of year it is. Who else is smoking."

He tamped the mixture into the end of his pipe, and handed it to me. He lit and I smoked.

The tobacco kicked like a mule. I felt my heart going nuts. I couldn't wait to get into the lodge to sweat.

"The tobacco carries out the poison. You'll be clean."

The sun was still trying to make it through. I saw how the street was divided into zones. Technology stores took the west. Stereo and Fan dealers the north. All the shoes seemed to be on the south side. The sound of RBG’s voice emanated from the hue and cry of the street. It led me to a small Asian shop oddly in the opposite direction of where she’d indicated, whose wares, mostly pocketbooks, gray goods, perfumes and cheap sandals, festooned the street from shelves and hangers.

From a distance I saw the little white half shoes of netting with flowers on the front. The shoes immediately took the place of Rainbow’s description. Reality and description literally flip-flopped. They were perfect for a well-dressed young lady. On anyone else they’d look gaudy, but on a bride in white they’d be perfect.

“Do you have these in a woman’s eleven?” I asked.

“I do,” said the man, and placed a larger set in my hands. “Three dollars.”

What shoes are three dollars anymore? It doesn’t matter. They only had to last a few hours.

Who was the girl getting married in three dollar sandals I wondered? I was already in love.

A Cherokee woman wearing a woman’s eleven probably was tall, with dark hair. I saw her with radiant skin. I imagined high cheekbones, a happy expression. I imagined her dress, all chiffon, and lace and though not expensive, exquisitely fitted to her figure, and to those of her friends. I imagined Rainbow insisting that in the hot weather only the simplest shoes were needed. They’d gone to Tulsa and bought pairs for all the girls, except the bride, she had feet that were too large. Where could she get a size eleven?

Elated and feeling the need to get this simple pair of shoes to Tulsa in the fastest way possible I walked up Broadway looking for a Federal Express. “There’s one at Kinko’s near Astor Place,” said a nice black lady at a bank on Broadway.

I thought of other things I could do. Perhaps I should get green and red markers and write or draw something on the inside of the sandals, best wishes to the bride and groom. A poem would be better but I didn’t have time. That kind of embellishment has to be thought out

Stay with the shoes. Stay with the shoes. Make sure they get there.

“Better check the zip code” I said to the lady behind the counter. The shoes fit nicely in a FedEx Pak, which was a little more expensive than a FedEx Letter. Thirty-seven bucks to send a pair of sandals halfway across the country.

The message was in the doing, in the finding, and getting to Tulsa in time for the wedding.

“You’re right there is an error.” The lady at the counter said. “She’s given you a nine, it should be a seven.”

”Did you check it against the address?”

‘Yes’ said the teller. ‘Everything else is right. The first number should be a seven.“

“Fine,” I said. “Change it on the ticket then. Thank you”

Getting through to someone is these days is the same as buying shoes.
It’s about sevens and nines and elevens. How did Buffalo Heart know? He blew his flute and something happened.

Rainbow was worrying about how the bride would look. Caring takes energy. Cooperation. Rainbow was making this wedding happen, I could tell.

I fantasized about the bride. Perhaps she’d be the kind of woman I’d like to marry. I’m already married but I was marrying her in my mind. She was someone I didn’t know, yet I could love her too? She was my wife, my daughter, my lover, my friend. She might be gorgeous, she might be homely.

What mattered was that she found happiness. That someone loved her.

I stopped at Starbucks for a cold coffee. Rainbow would call soon. “Mark, the zip is wrong, It’s 71495.”

“I caught it Rainbow. The shoes are on their way. Who’s the bride?”

“Do you remember Sandra? Her older brother is getting married. She’s a nurse. They were at the funeral.”

I thought of Rainbow’s cousin Winter, the one who overdosed. She was just a teenage kid. Rainbow flew back to Tulsa around the same time, but never did go to the service - she was having enough of a time just hanging on.

I remember Rainbow’s depression after it happened. She said she felt like taking heroine too. I shuddered when I thought of it.

“The wedding’s tomorrow. It’s by a lake. There’s a house there with sculptures and a beautiful beach. Gotta go. Thank you, thank you!”

I sipped my iced coffee. The shoes were needed. Shoes to Tulsa.

Suddenly I was sitting alone with the girl getting married. What was her name? I’ll have to kiss the bride, and thank her.

It was a lovely wedding.